He had allowed between twenty and thirty miles for her drift. He had calculated that a mile an hour would be a fair allowance for a vessel that was dragging her anchor, and he did not think that the wind had been strong enough to make her drag her anchor for more than twenty hours, and certainly, as he thought, not more than thirty, at the farthest. Upon this principle he acted, and when he headed the Antelope north by west, he hoped to catch sight of the lost ship before noon. For the Antelope, with a fair wind, could make as much as four or five miles an hour; and, after making every allowance for currents, or for leeway, she ought to do twenty miles between six o’clock in the morning and midday. And so, full of confidence in the ability of the Antelope to do her duty, Captain Corbet took his station at the helm. Now that a gleam of hope had appeared, he was a different man. The gleam became brighter and brighter, until at last it grew to be positive sunshine. He forgot his recent despair. The more he thought of his theory of the Petrel dragging her anchor, the more convinced he was that it was correct, and the more certain he was that he would ultimately catch sight of her. And so he kept on his course, with his eyes fixed on the horizon before him, anxiously awaiting the time when he would descry the masts of the lost vessel becoming gradually defined against the sky. Hour after hour passed. The Antelope sailed on. Midday came. The Antelope had traversed the distance which her commander had allotted for the utmost possible drift of the Petrel. Yet not the slightest sign of the Petrel had appeared. The hopes upon which Captain Corbet had been relying gradually sank under him. When midday came, and the masts of the Petrel did not appear, hope sank away, and despondency came, and despondency deepened into despair. All that he had felt at early dawn, when he first looked abroad upon the seas and found her not, now came back to him,--all the self-reproach, all the remorse, all the anguish of soul. He stood at the helm, and let the Antelope pass onward, but there was no longer any hope in his mind. He was overwhelmed, and now even the possibility of finding her seemed to be taken away. All this time the wind had gone on increasing in violence, and the sea had risen more and more. For himself and for the Antelope Captain Corbet did not care; but the lowery sky and the stormy sea seemed terrible to him, for they spoke to him of the lost boys, and told a tale of horror. XVIII.