The fog had all departed now.  North, east, south, and west, nothing but the gray of onrushing waves and a shrouded sky as implacable as the morning of doom.  Darkness was falling swiftly.  Soon the terrible night began.

Not that it was the worst storm in which Dan had ever been, but certainly he had never faced North Atlantic tumult under such a disadvantage, under conditions so desperately precarious.  The bow rose but heavily to the seas, and never topped them.  The water rushing over, poured down the deck in mill-races, filling it to the rails, occasionally springing up over the poop and the top of the after cabin, lashing the faces of the two crouching at the wheel behind it.

“It’s a sou’easter, I’m almost certain,” roared Dan in the girl’s ear.  “It will work up to a climax gradually, and then gradually go down, at this season of the year.  Don’t be afraid of the water.  We can’t sink, I believe; the only danger is that we might break up—­and we won’t do that.”

But despite the optimism of his words, Dan was not altogether certain that the wallowing wreck would hold together.  There was nothing to do but wait and see.  The situation he grasped in all its grievous details.  He had never been so happy, so utterly at peace as aboard this derelict.  No gilded barge of antiquity had ever been so glorious, so golden as this mangled wraith of the seas in the sunlit hours of the immediate past.  Her voice, her laughter, had filled them with music, her presence with all the poetry and romance of the world, and the light in her eyes shining for him alone had filled him with a great tenderness.

Now, the night, the storm, danger—­death, perhaps.  He shut his jaws and drove the flooding thoughts from his mind.  Anger,—­the anger of bereavement,—­filled him, and he glared into the tempest and twisted the wheel as though combating a sentient adversary.

An hour passed, Cimmerian blackness had fallen.  The waves came savagely, ill-defined masses let loose from a viewless limbo to work their harm.  Sometimes they caught the dull gray flash of breaking waters, but more often everything was hidden.  The roar of the wind and wave was incessant.

Dan’s efforts to keep the derelict’s head to the seas had failed.  The hulk had slued around and was driving before the tempest, whither he did not know.  Groaning, crashing, crackling, the hulk lumbered on.  Once a wave leaped over the stern, stunning them with its thunderous impact, dragging at them powerfully, as though to draw them back into the sea whence it came.

Plunging thus, helpless, unseeing, they seemed to be flying as swiftly as the wind.  A wild ride—­to where?  Were they driving out into the lonely heart of the deep, there to perish in a last long dive?  Or was it shoreward, with oblivion coming in the dreadful grinding and crashing and shattering of timbers?

Neither had the heart for even a faint hope for safety; and yet Dan, with his hands stiffened on the wheel spokes, fought on.  The girl, with her head bowed, sat still, her hands clinging to his shoulders.  They did not speak.  Twice Dan had attempted to utter a cheering word, but the wind had swept the sounds from his lips.