must prove too much for me, to
whom five pounds was a considerable sum, though, as I have told you, my
mother's slender income was enough for us both. Besides, the money these
men might ask would be far more fitly devoted to Helga, who had lost all
save what she stood in--who was without a friend in England except
myself and mother, who had been left by her father without a farthing
saving some pitiful sum of insurance-money, which she would not get for
many a long day, and who, brave heart! would, therefore, need my
mother's purse to refurnish her wardrobe and embark her for her Danish
home, if, indeed, there would _now_ be a home for her at Kolding.

These considerations passed with the velocity of thought through my
mind. On the other hand, we were no longer aboard a stationary raft, but
in a nimble little lugger that every hour was carrying us into a new
prospect of ocean; and we might be sure, therefore, of speedily falling
in with a homeward-bound steamer that would convey us to England in a
tenth of the time the lugger would occupy, very much more comfortably
too, and at the cost of a few shillings, so to speak. Then, again, I
felt too grateful for our preservation, too glad and rejoiceful over
our deliverance from the dreadful future that had just now lain before
us, to remonstrate with the men, to oppose their wishes to pursue their
course, to utter a word, in short, that might make them suppose I did
not consider our mere escape from the raft good fortune enough.

'Surely it would not take them very long,' Helga whispered in my ear,
'to sail this boat back to Penzance?'

I repeated, in a voice inaudible to the others, the reflections which
had occurred to me.

'Why, see there now!' bawled one of the boatmen, pointing with a shadowy
hand into the dusk over the lee quarter. 'There's plenty of the likes of
her to fall in with; only _she's_ agoing the wrong way.'

I peered, and spied the green side and white masthead lanterns of a
steamer propelling along the water at about a quarter of a mile distant.
I could faintly distinguish the loom of her black length, like a smear
of ink upon the obscurity, and the line of her smoke against the stars,
with now and again a little leap of furnace-light at the funnel-mouth
that, while it hung there, might have passed for the blood-red visage

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