“Perhaps he was the owner of the vessel himself?”

“Yes, she was all the property we possessed,” Salve answered, quietly.  “But we are none the less grateful to your husband for rescuing us, and we have unfortunately very little to thank him with for venturing his life out on the banks in such weather.”

“So you’ve been at that game again, Ib,” said the wife, turning to her husband reproachfully, but not seeming altogether sincere in her reproach.

Turning to Salve then she said a little curtly, “For the like of that we take no payment,” adding in a milder tone, “We have two sons ourselves who ply to Norway—­there’s a bad coast there too.”

Salve was pale and worn out with over-exertion, and after taking a mouthful of food he lay down to rest.  But he could not sleep, and towards morning he was lying awake listening to the dull booming of the distant sea.  Elizabeth was tossing about feverishly and talking in her sleep.  Her brain was evidently busy with the terrors of the previous night, and from occasional words it seemed as if he had a share in her thoughts.  He lay and listened, though there was not much to be made out of her disjointed utterances.  She grew more restless, and began to talk more excitedly—­

“Never! never!” she said, vehemently; “he shall never hear a word about the brig,” and she went on then in a confidential whisper—­

“Shall he, Gjert?  He shall find us in our berth, or else he will think we are afraid.”

Salve kissed her forehead tenderly, but with a sigh.  There had been a motive then, after all, at the bottom of that display of confidence which had occasioned him such pangs of self-reproach.

A couple of hours after he was on the way down to the sea to look at the brig.  The general aspect of the world about him was in harmony with his mood.  The wind whistled over the dreary sand-hills, whirling the sand in clouds in among the downs that stretched away like a storm-tossed sea into the distance, in every variety of desolate and jagged outline.  Upon the melancholy shore a sea-gull or two were circling round some old black stumps of wreck that protruded from the sand; while beyond lay the dismal expanse of the western sea, without a sail upon its leaden waste of waters, so shunned by all.  Dreariness, wreck, and desolation were on every side; and it seemed to Salve that it was only a reflection of his own life.  He had got to be the owner of a brig, and there it lay, what remained of it, buried in the sand.  He had succeeded in making Elizabeth his own, but had he thereby added anything to the happiness of his life?

He stood gazing at the remains of his brig, over which the yellow waves were breaking, in a state of gloomy abstraction, from which he was only aroused by the approach of Ib Mathisen and a party of his own crew, who had followed him to the shore to see if possibly they might retrieve some of their property.  He joined them in the search, and with but small result; three ship chests and the compass being all the reward of an hour’s labour among the timber-ends and bolts and pieces of rigging that strewed the beach, or made ripples in the sand for a long distance in either direction.