“They are gone!” he exclaimed, breathing long and heavily, like one whose respiration had been unnaturally suspended.

“They are gone!” echoed the governess, turning an eye, that was contracting with the intensity or her care, on the marble-like and motionless form of her pupil “There is no longer any hope.”

The look that Wilder bestowed, on the same silent out lovely statue, was scarcely less expressive than “he gaze of her who had nurtured the infancy of the Southern Heiress, in innocence and love.  His brow grew thoughtful, and his lips became compressed, while all the resources of his fertile imagination and long experience gathered in his mind, in engrossing intense reflection.

“Is there hope?” demanded the governess, who was watching the change of his working countenance, with an attention that never swerved.

The gloom passed away from his swarthy features, and the smile that lighted them was like the radiance of the sun, as it breaks through the blackest vapours of the drifting gust.

“There is!” he said with firmness; “our case is far from desperate.”

“Then, may He who rules the ocean and the land receive the praise!” cried the grateful governess giving vent to her long-suppressed agony in a flood of tears.

Gertrude cast herself upon the neck of Mrs Wyllys, and for a minute their unrestrained emotions were mingled.

“And now, my dearest Madam,” said Gertrude, leaving the arms of her governess, “let us trust to the skill of Mr Wilder; he has foreseen and foretold this danger; equally well may he predict our safety.”

“Foreseen and foretold!” returned the other, in a manner to show that her faith in the professional prescience of the stranger was not altogether so unbounded as that of her more youthful and ardent companion.  “No mortal could have foreseen this awful calamity; and least of all, foreseeing it, would he have sought to incur its danger!  Mr Wilder, I will not annoy you with requests for explanations that might now be useless, but you will not refuse to communicate your grounds of hope.”

Wilder hastened to relieve a curiosity that he well knew must be as painful as it was natural.  The mutineers had left the largest, and much the safest, of the two boats belonging to the wreck, from a desire to improve the calm, well knowing that hours of severe labour would be necessary to launch it, from the place it occupied between the stumps of the two principal masts, into the ocean.  This operation, which might have been executed in a few minutes with the ordinary purchases of the ship, would have required all their strength united, and that, too, to be exercised with a discretion and care that would have consumed too many of those moments which they rightly deemed to be so precious at that wild and unstable season of the year.  Into this little ark Wilder proposed to convey such articles of comfort and necessity as he might hastily collect from the abandoned vessel; and then, entering it with his companions, to await the critical instant when the wreck should sink from beneath them.