'He rented a house, but it will be no home for me if I cannot afford to maintain it. But let my future be _my_ trouble, Hugh,' said she gently, looking at me, and always pronouncing my name as a sister might a brother's.

'Oh no!' said I. 'I am under a promise to your father--a promise that his death makes binding as a sacred oath upon me. Your future must be _my_ business. If I carry you home in safety--I mean to my mother's home, Helga--I shall consider that I saved your life; and the life a man rescues it should be his privilege to render as easy and happy as it may lie in his power to make it. You have friends in my mother and me, even though you had not another in the wide world. So, Helga,' said I, taking her hand, 'however our strange rambles may end, you will promise me not to fret over what your future may hold when you get ashore.'

She looked at me with her eyes impassioned with gratitude. Her lips moved, but no word escaped her, and she averted her face to hide her tears.

Poor, brave, gentle little Helga! I spoke but out of my friendship and my sympathy for her, as who would not, situated as I was with her, my companion in distress, now an orphan, desolate, friendless, and poor? Yet I little knew then, heedless and inexperienced as I was in such matters, how pity in the heart of a young man will swiftly sweeten into deeper emotion when the object of it is young and fair and loving, and alone in the world.

The sun went down on a wild scene of troubled, running, foaming waters, darkling into green as they leapt and broke along the western sky, that was of a thunderous, smoky tincture, with a hot, dim, and stormy scarlet which flushed the clouds to the zenith. Yet there had been no increase in the wind during the afternoon. It had settled into a hard breeze, good for outward-bounders, but of a sort to send everything heading north that was not steam scattering east and west, with yards fore-and-aft and tacks complaining.

By this time I had grown very well used to the motion of the lugger, had marked her easy flight from liquid peak into foam-laced valley, the onward buoyant bound again, the steady rush upon the head of the creaming sea, with foam to the line of the bulwark-rail, and the air for an instant snowlike with flying spume, and all the while the inside of the boat as dry as toast. This, I say, I had noticed with increasing admiration of the sea-going qualities of the hearty, bouncing, stalwart little fabric; and I was no longer sensible of the anxiety that had before possessed me 

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