“Will you ride it out?” asked McKay of the captain, as the two stood with the doctor crouched under the gunwale of the yacht and holding on to the shrouds.

“Why shouldn’t we?” replied Trejago, shortly, as though the question was an insult to himself and his ship.

“That’s more than some can say!” cried the doctor, pointing to one great ship, the ill-fated Prince, which had evidently dragged her anchors and was drifting perilously towards the cliffs.

“Our tackle is sound and the holding is good,” said Trejago, hopefully.  “But we ought not to speak so loud.  It may alarm Mrs. Wilders.”

“Does she not know our danger?  Some one ought to tell her.  You had better go, McKay.”

The aide-de-camp made rather a wry face.  He was not fond of Mrs. Wilders, whose manner, sometimes oily, sometimes supercilious, was too changeable to please him, and he felt that the woman was not true.

However, he went down to the cabin, where he found Mrs. Wilders, with a white, scared face, cowering in a corner as she listened to the howling of the storm.

“Is there anything the matter?” she cried, springing up as he appeared.  “Is there any danger?”

“I trust not; still, it is well to be prepared.”

“For what?  Do you mean that we may be lost, drowned—­here, in sight of port—­all of us—­my dear general and myself?  It is too dreadful!  Why does not the captain run inside the harbour and put us on dry ground?”

“I fear it would be too great a risk to try and make the mouth of the harbour in this gale.”

“Then why don’t you seek help from some of the other ships—­the men-of-war?  There are plenty of them all around.”

“Every ship outside Balaclava is in the same stress as ourselves.  They could spare us no help, even if we asked for it.”

“What, then, are we to do?—­in Heaven’s name!”

“Trust in Providence and hope for the best!  But I think—­if I might suggest—­it would be as well to keep the general in ignorance of our condition, which is not so very desperate after all.”

“How do you mean?”

“‘Our cables are stout,’ Captain Trejago says, and we ought to be able to ride out the storm.”

And the Arcadia did so gallantly all that day, in the teeth of the hurricane, which blew with unabated fury for many more hours, and in spite of the tempest-torn sea, which now ran mountains high.

All through that anxious day Trejago kept the deck, watching the sky and the storm.  It was late in the afternoon when he said, with a sigh of relief—­

“The wind is hauling round to the westward; I expect the gale will abate before long.”

He was right, although to eyes less keen there was small comfort yet in the signs of the weather.

It was an awful scene—­ships everywhere in distress:  some on the point of foundering, others being dashed to pieces on the rocks.  The great waves, as they raged past in fearful haste, bore upon their foaming crests great masses of wreck, the dread vestiges of terrible disasters.  Amongst the floating timbers and spars, encumbered with tangles of cordage, floated great bundles of hay, the lost cargo of heavily-laden transports that had gone down.