So they watched the sun dropping lower and lower in the western sky without any one voicing the thought that must have been in each mind.  The same inscrutable Providence that had watched over them by day would still guard them when the light was gone.  Under the stars, seeming now so much nearer and brighter than when ashore, they went on and on, until back in the east another day dawned, the great day of hope for them!

Jack had taken to looking eagerly ahead once more.

“What do you think you see?” Beverly asked him, for Tom again served as pilot at the steering gear.

“Why, I’m all mixed up about it,” came the slow reply.  “It certainly isn’t a steamer, and again it just can’t be land!”

“Well, hardly,” Beverly answered.  “To tell the honest truth I don’t believe there’s a foot of land closer to us than the Bermudas, which must lie off in that direction,” pointing further toward the southwest.

“When the sun glints on it I’m fairly dazzled,” Jack continued, “just as if some one had used a piece of broken looking-glass to shoot the rays into my eyes.  And then there’s a sort of queer mist hanging about that thing in the bargain, so that sometimes it’s almost blotted out.  What under the sun can it be?”

“I think I can give a guess,” Tom called back.  “How would an iceberg fill the bill, Colin?”

“Just the thing, I’d say,” the lieutenant answered, “only who ever heard of an iceberg floating down in mid-Atlantic at this season of the year?  Such a thing would be uncommon, to say the least.”

“But not impossible?” ventured Tom, to which the other agreed.

“Take a look, and tell us, Colin,” urged Jack, offering the glasses.

A minute afterwards they were handed bade again.

“Just what it is, Tom, after all,” reported Beverly.  “A pretty tall berg it seems to be, with an extensive ice-floe around it as level in spots as a floor.  I thought I saw something move on it that might be a Polar bear, caught when the berg broke away from its Arctic glacier.  We will pass directly over, and may be able to feel the chill.”

“It was the Titanic, wasn’t it, that bumped into an iceberg, and went down with such a frightful loss of life?” remarked Jack.

“No other,” replied Tom.  “But we’ll try to make sure nothing like that happens to our frail craft.  Try to guess what would happen to that monster berg if we hit head on?”

“Hardly a crack!” Jack retorted.  “But I’m more interested in wondering what would become of us.  Guess we’d better keep a good thousand feet up, and not bother trying to pry into the ice-floe’s secrets.”

“I’m not dreaming of dropping a foot lower just at present,” Tom said decisively; and not one of them dreamed how soon that decision would have to be reversed, since all still looked fair about them, with no storm in sight and the wonderful motors kept up their regular pulsations as if capable of going on forever.