the faint flap of the rippling tide, they drifted, drifted, drifted.
Then they thought of home once more, and now with other feelings. Death was before them—slow, sure, relentless death. There was to be no jugglery. Let it be death at home rather than death on this desert sea. Anything, anything but this blind end—this dumb end; this dying bit by bit on still waters. To see the darkness come again and the sun rise afresh, and once more the sun sink and the darkness deepen, and still to lie there with nothing around but the changeless sea, and nothing above but the empty sky, and only the eye of God upon them, while the winds and the waters lay in His avenging hand. Let it rather be death—swift death, just death—there where their crime was attempted, and one black deed was done.
Thus despair took hold of them and drove all fear away. Each hard man, with despair seated on his rugged face, longed, like a sick child, to lay his head in the lap of home.
"What's it saying?" muttered the old man Quilleash, "'A green hill when far away; bare, bare when it is near.'"
It was some vague sense of their hopelessness that was floating through the old man's mind as he recalled the pathetic Manx proverb. The others looked down at the deck with a stony stare.
Danny still lay forward. When the speck that had glided along the waters could be seen no more, he had turned and gazed in silence towards the eastern light and the distant shores of morning. If madness be the
