“I can’t stay with you any longer now,” he said.  “I am responsible for the lives of all on board, and must do my duty by them.”

“Do your duty, Salve,” she said.

“And so,” he concluded, as, trying to conceal his emotion, he stroked her forehead and then the child’s, “you must keep a good heart.  When the pinch comes I shall be at your side, and we shall win through it, you’ll see.”

“With God’s gracious help!” she answered; “remember that, Salve.”

He strode away then down the deck and called the crew aft to take counsel with him on the situation.  The vessel was rapidly becoming water-logged.

“Listen, my lads!” he said; “this is a serious business, as you can all very clearly see.  But if we only have stout hearts we may get out of it yet, at all events with our lives.  We have about three hours still before we run upon the sandbanks; but by that time it will have begun to get dark, and it may be difficult for the people on shore to come to our rescue.  We must steer straight in and choose the likeliest place ourselves; and if you are of the same way of thinking we’ll head for the shore now at once, rather than wait to have the old craft flung over the banks in the dark like a dead fish.”

The crew were silent, and looked anxiously over towards the land.  But when Nils Buvaagen declared himself a supporter of the captain’s plan by crossing over the deck to him, all the others followed.

Salve went himself to the wheel, and gave the order to “Ease off the sheet.”

“Ease it is,” was the answer; and that was the last order ever given on board the Apollo.

Running now before the wind, they rapidly approached the land.  Salve stood at the wheel, resting his knee from time to time on one of the spokes, with a concentrated look on his dark keen face, and his eye searching like a kite’s along the coast for the place they were to make for.  A couple of times he took up the glass and directed it towards the downs, where a group of people were moving about.

The chalk-white wall of water, rising and falling, grew higher and higher as they approached it; the noise and the dull roar of the breakers became more and more deafening, and a feeling of faintness crept over Elizabeth as she looked towards the land, and began to realise their danger.

The suspense was so painfully prolonged, a mist was coming before her eyes, so that she could scarcely see Salve over at the wheel; and she tried, in her terror, to keep them fixed upon the child in her arms.  The seething, hissing sound in the air around her kept increasing, and made her giddy; a confusion of wild sounds, that grew louder and ever louder, seemed to fill her brain; and before her eyes there was nothing but a whirl of scudding flakes of white.  A mass of sand-laden foaming water appeared then suddenly to rise before her with a towering crest; she heard one loud cry of terror from different voices; the brig seemed lifted high in the air; the mainmast tottered; and a suffocating deluge of water came crashing down upon her, nearly carrying her with it down the cabin stairs, where she was clinging.  Again and again it came, and her one thought now was to hold fast.