Although the light land-breeze would now have sufficed to carry her a knot or two through the water, she preferred maintaining her position and giving her people a good night's rest to getting under way.

The situation of this felucca and the circumstance that she had been boarded by the frigate rendered her an object of some distrust with Raoul through the early part of the evening, and he had ordered a vigilant eye to be kept on her; but nothing had been discovered to confirm these suspicions.

The movements of her people--the manner in which she brought-up--the quiet that prevailed on board her, and even the lubberly disposition of her spars and rigging, went to satisfy Raoul that she had no man-of-war's men on board her.

Still, as she lay less than a mile outside of the lugger though now dead to leeward all that distance, she was to be watched; and one of the seamen, he in the rigging, rarely had his eyes off her a minute at a time.

The second coaster was a little to the southward of the frigate, under her canvas, hauling in for the land; doubtless with a view to get as much as possible of the breeze from the mountains, and standing slowly to the south.