While the busy matron was thus happily employed in her labors of love,—­for such they emphatically were to her,—­the daughter, a girl of eighteen years of age, and two younger sons, were with their father on the beach, assisting him in sorting, and putting in barrels, a quantity of fish, designed for the family’s use during the winter.

“It will be a fearful night, father,” said the girl, pausing from her labors, and looking out on the black, swollen waves, while the wind, as it swept furiously by, more than once obliged her to cling to the rock for support.

“It will be a fearful night, father,” she repeated,—­and, hesitating for a moment, she added, “and brother William is at sea.”

“Ay,” responded the brawny, stalwart, and good-humored looking man, “it will be, as you say, lass, a stormy night, and a terrible one, I reckon, to poor seamen,—­for there is more than William on the ocean.”

A faint flush tinged with a deeper hue the girl’s countenance, already bronzed by exposure to sun and wind, while her dark grey eye grew moist with unshed tears.  It was evident that there was something deeper in the old man’s speech, than the mere words would seem to imply,—­some covert allusion which thus called forth her emotion.

“The vessel was to have left more than a week ago; it ought to be near the coast by this time,” said the fisherman, in a tone of uneasiness.

He turned to address his daughter, but she was no longer at his side; and, looking in the distance, he perceived her climbing a high and jutting rock, from which the ocean, for miles around, was distinctly visible.  Ellen, for that was her name, having at length ascended, stood with agile yet firm feet on the eminence, shading, with one hand, the sun, which now, peering from behind a mass of dark purple clouds, lit up for a moment the turbid waves, and gleamed on rock and beach and fishermen’s huts,—­and with the other holding on to the sharp edge of a projecting rock, that still towered above her.  Nor as she thus stood, was she, by any means, an unpicturesque object; the sunshine glancing on her neatly arranged brown hair, her tall figure, slight for that of a hardy fisherman’s child, clad in a black skirt and crimson jacket, and every feature of her speaking countenance wearing a commingled expression of anxiety, hope, and tenderness.

How her eager vision seemed to catch, in a moment, each feature of the scene; the sandy beach—­the rugged hill—­her father’s shallop—­and he, standing in the position she had left him, gazing out into the sea; and with what a lingering, straining glance, did her eyes wander over that pathless ocean, while her heart sank within her, as she contemplated its angry and menacing appearance.

“Not a sail in sight,” she murmured, “and the night coming on so fearfully black.  Oh, Edward, shall I ever see you again!” was her exclamation, uttered in a tone full of wild pathos, while the hand, that had been upraised to shade the sun’s rays, fell listless at her side.