It was night.  I saw the glimmer of the moonlight on the seas, a tranquil, balmy night; but some dark object was interposed between me and the stars which, I knew, were shining above, and the raft lay motionless upon the waters.  I was aware, when my senses returned temporarily, that the bow of a mighty vessel was projected above our frail place of refuge, and that we were saved.  The dove had come at last!

When or how we were lifted to the deck of the ship I knew not, for, having partially revived, I soon drifted away again into profound lethargy and entire unconsciousness, which for a time seemed death.

CHAPTER V.

A woman sat sewing near my berth in the state-room in which I found myself; a fan, lying on a small table at her side, betokened in what manner she had divided her attentions—­between her needle and her helpless charge.  I thought; indeed, that I had felt its soft plumes glide gently across my face in the very moment of my awakening in the first amazement of which I but dimly comprehended the circumstances that surrounded me.

“What brought this stranger to my pillow!  Who and what was she?  Where was I!” These were my mental queries at the first.  Then, as the truth gradually dawned over my sluggish and bewildered brain, I lay quietly revolving matters, and noticed my self-constituted nurse, and my surroundings, with the close yet careless observation of a child.

The woman, on whom my gaze was earliest fixed (while her own seemed riveted on the work upon her knee), was of middle age or beyond it, of medium size, of square and sturdy make, and homely to the very verge of ugliness.  She was dressed plainly if not commonly in black, but there was a general air of decency about her that seemed to place her beyond the sphere of servitude.  She wore spectacles set in tortoise-shell frames, and she wore her iron-gray hair straight back behind small, funnel-shaped ears, and gathered into the tightest knot behind.  Her head was flat and narrow at the summit, though broad at and above the base of the brain.  Her forehead, wide yet low, was ignoble in expression.  The mouth, shaped like a horseshoe, was curved down at the corners, and was full of sullen resolution.  The nose, pinched, yet not pointed, showed scarcely any nostril, and might as well have been made of wood, for any meaning it betrayed.  Her eyebrows were short, wide, rugged, and irregular, though very black; the cast-down eyes, of course, so far inscrutable.

She was shaping a flimsy, black-silk dress, and doing it deftly, though it was a marvel to me how hands so stiff and cramped as hers appeared to be could handle a needle at all.

On one of these gnarled and unlovely fingers she wore a ring which, in the idleness of the mood that possessed me, I examined listlessly.  It was an old-fashioned and slender circle of gold, so pale that it looked silvery, such as in times long past had commonly been used either for troth-plight or marriage-vows, surmounted by two small united hearts of the same dull metal by way of ornament.  Mrs. Austin, I remembered, possessed one, the aversion of my childhood, that seemed its counterpart.