“What is this?” exclaimed his mother.  “You wilful boy, may I ask where, in all the world, you have been?”

“I have just come from the bay.  O father and mother!  O Mr. and Mrs. Wolston!  O Master Willis! if you had only seen!  The sea is furious; sometimes the waves rise to the skies and mingle with the clouds, so that it is impossible to say where the one begins and the other ends.  It is frightful, but it is magnificent!”

“And the sloop?” demanded Willis.

“She is not to be seen; she is no longer at anchor in the bay.”

“Gone to the open sea, to avoid being driven ashore,” said Wolston.  “Captain Littlestone is not the man to remain in a perilous position whilst there remained a means of escape; besides, nothing that science, united with courage and presence of mind, could do, would have been neglected by him to save his ship.”

“In addition to which,” observed Becker, “if he had found himself in positive danger, he would have fired a gun; and in that case, though we are not pilots, every one of us would have hastened to his assistance.”

“You see, Willis,” said Mrs. Wolston, “God comes to ease your mind; were we to allow you to go to the sloop now, the thing is simply impossible.”

“I have my own idea about that,” insisted Willis, whilst he kept beating a tatoo on the isinglass window panes.

Whilst thus chafing like a caged lion, Wolston’s youngest daughter went towards him, and gently putting her hand in his, said, “Sweetheart” (for so she had been accustomed to address him), “do you remember when, during the voyage, you used to look at me very closely, and that one evening I went boldly up to you and asked you why you did so?”

“Yes, Miss Sophia, I recollect.”

“Do you remember the answer you gave me?”

“Yes, I told you that I had left in England, on her mother’s bosom, a little girl who would now be about your own age, and that I could not observe the wind play amongst the curls of your fair hair without thinking of her, and that it sometimes made my breast swell like the mizen-top-sail before the breeze.”

“Yes, and when I promised to keep out of your sight, not to reawaken your grief, you told me it was a kind of grief that did you more good than harm, and that the more it made you grieve, the happier you would be.”

“All true:”  replied the sailor, whose excitement was melting away before the soft tones of the child like hoar frost in the sunshine.

“Then I promised to come and talk to you about your Susan every day; and did I not keep my word?”

“Certainly, Miss Sophia; and it is only bare justice to say that you gracefully yielded to all my fatherly whims, and even went so far as to wear a brown dress oftener than another, because I said that my little Susan wore that color the last time I kissed her.”

“Oh, but that is a secret, Willis.”

“Yes, but I am going to tell all our secrets—­that is an idea of mine.  You then went and learned Susan’s mother’s favorite song, with which you would sometimes sing me to sleep, like a great baby that I am, and make me fancy that I was surrounded by my wife and daughter, and was comfortably smoking my pipe in my own cottage, with a glass of grog at my elbow.”