“It’s going to cloud over,” he said.  “There may be some deviltry before we make shore.”

He moistened his fingers, moving them to and fro in the air.

“It isn’t a storm,” he said; “it is fog.”

“Fog!” The girl was trembling.  “What does that mean?”

“It means that for a while old ocean is going to destroy all our pretty scenery, and that it is going to be cold and nasty and disagreeable.”

Already, in fact, the ocean had lost its color.  Heavy blue-white clouds with shredded, filmy foundations, which seemed almost to sweep the waters, moved swiftly to the westward, while in the background the wall of mist advanced silently to encompass them.  They could feel its breath, heavy, clammy, chilling.

Presently a mass of vapor, like a detached squadron of cavalry, swept about the derelict and then moved on, leaving little shredded patches hanging about the foremast.

Quite unknown to the girl, Dan, the preceding day, had constructed a raft, which he regarded as being quite as safe for ocean travelling, if not quite so comfortable, as the derelict.  He had lashed supplies, a small cask of water, and the like thereon, and now, with the fog-pall gathering about, he went amidships, examined it carefully, and made sure that nothing would prevent a hasty launching in event of disaster.

When he returned the murk had closed in thickly.  It was as though the vessel were immured from the world.  Virginia was standing at the wheel, and with the pall throwing the derelict into more sombre relief, Dan caught more strongly than ever the utter contrast which her presence brought to this abandoned hulk.  Whenever she had walked along the deck it had seemed a profanation to him that the uneven planking should know her tread; that she should be on the derelict at all was, he felt, a working of Fate against everything that was beautiful and graceful.

Now, as she stood there in the pallid gloom, she suggested some tall, beautiful genius, presiding over the wrack of elemental things, facing a more glorious future.

“How shut in everything seems!” she said, as Dan took the wheel from her hands.  He had a long fog-horn which he blew at intervals.

“We haven’t seen a speck of a ship,” he explained, “but now the fog is about us there’s liable to be a fleet of them in our vicinity at any time.  At least that has been my experience with fogs.  It would not be much fun to be rammed, although in our present condition I fancy it would hurt the other vessel more than it would this.”

Hour after hour they went on blindly, silently, save at such times as Dan’s raucous horn blasts went tearing through the fog.  The wind had died away.  Sometimes the forward part of the vessel was hidden from their view.  Frequently it seemed distorted; strange phantom shapes filled the deck, and the soughing of the yielding hull brought strange, uncanny sounds to their ears.