“True!” exclaimed Wilder, as though he had just become conscious of her presence.  “Quite probable and very true.  Mr Earing, the air is getting too heavy for that duck.  Hand all your top-gallant sails, and haul the ship up closer.  Should the wind hang here at east-with-southing, we may want what offing we can get.”

The mate replied in the prompt and obedient manner which seamen use to their superiors; and; lifter scanning the signs of the weather for a moment, he promptly proceeded to see the order executed.  While the men were on the yards furling the light canvas, the females walked apart, leaving the young Commander to the uninterrupted discharge of his duty.  But Wilder, so far from deeming it necessary to lend his attention to so ordinary a service, the moment after he had spoken, seemed perfectly unconscious that the mandate had issued from his mouth.  He stood on the precise spot where the view of the ocean and the heavens had first caught his eye, and his gaze still continued fastened on the aspect of the two elements.  His look was always in the direction of the wind, which, though far from a gale, often fell upon the sails of the ship in heavy and sullen puffs.  After a long and anxious examination, the young mariner muttered his thoughts to himself, and commenced pacing the deck with rapid footsteps.  Still he would make sudden and short pauses, and again rivet his gaze on the point of the compass whence the blasts came sweeping across the waste of waters; as though he distrusted the weather, and would fain cause his keen glance to penetrate the gloom of night, in order to relieve some painful doubts.  At length his step became arrested, in one of those quick turns that he made at each end of his narrow walk.  Mrs Wyllys and Gertrude stood nigh, and were enabled to read something of the anxious character of his countenance, as his eye became suddenly fastened on a distant point of the ocean, though in a quarter exactly opposite to that whither his former looks had been directed.

“Do you so much distrust the weather?” asked the governess, when she thought his examination had endured long enough to become ominous of evil.

“One looks not to leeward for the signs of the weather, in a breeze like this,” was the answer.

“What see you, then, to fasten your eye on thus intently?”

Wilder slowly raised his arm, and was about to point with his finger, when the limb suddenly fell again.

“It was delusion!” he muttered, turning quickly on his heel, and pacing the deck still more rapidly than ever.

His companions watched the extraordinary, and apparently unconscious, movements of the young Commander, with amazement, and not without a little secret dismay.  Their own looks wandered over the expanse of troubled water to leeward, but nowhere could they see more than the tossing element, capped with those ridges of garish foam which served only to make the chilling waste more dreary and imposing.