I strove to compel myself to think we would make the landing safely, and so I spoke, not what I believed, but what I preferred to believe.
I recoiled before contemplation of that frightful death, and for a moment I entertained the wild idea of seizing Maud in my arms and leaping overboard.

Then I resolved to wait, and at the last moment, when we entered on the final stretch, to take her in my arms and proclaim my love, and, with her in my embrace, to make the desperate struggle and die.
Instinctively we drew closer together in the bottom of the boat.

I felt her mittened hand come out to mine.

And thus, without speech, we waited the end.

We were not far off the line the wind made with the western edge of the promontory, and I watched in the hope that some set of the current or send of the sea would drift us past before we reached the surf.
"We shall go clear," I said, with a confidence which I knew deceived neither of us.
"By God, we _will_ go clear!" I cried, five minutes later.
The oath left my lips in my excitement--the first, I do believe, in my life, unless "trouble it," an expletive of my youth, be accounted an oath.
"I beg your pardon," I said.
"You have convinced me of your sincerity," she said, with a faint smile.
"I do know, now, that we shall go clear." I had seen a distant headland past the extreme edge of the promontory, and as we looked we could see grow the intervening coastline of what was evidently a deep cove.