he rope and drew the boat in.

As it drew alongside out of the darkness she leapt on board and cast off.
The paddles, as she laboriously shipped them between the thole-pins, were
unconscionably heavy; she knew little of rowing, and nothing of
double-sculling. But the tide helped her. By pulling now one paddle, now
another, she worked the boat across and down towards the ladder and the
quay-door at the end of Mr. Benny's yard.

Nearing it, she found herself in slack water, and the boat became more
manageable, giving her time between the strokes to glance over her
shoulder and scan the dark shadow under the longshore wall, where each
garden and alley-way had its quay-door and its ladder reaching down into
the tide. Now the most of these quay-doors were painted green or blue,
but Mr. Benny's a light grey, which in the darkness should have made it
easily discernible. Yet for some while she could not find it.

Suddenly, as she threaded her way along, scarcely using her paddles now
except to fend off the boats which, lying peaceably at their moorings,
seemed to crowd around with intent to impede her, a schooner's masts and
spars loomed up before her high against the inky night. Then she
understood. The vessel--her name, the _One-and-All_, in white letters on
her forward bulwarks, glimmered into sight as Myra passed--lay warped
alongside the wall, with her foreyard braced aslant to avoid chafing the
roof of Mr. Benny's office, and her mainmast and standing rigging all but
entirely hiding Mr. Benny's quay-door, the approach to which she
completely obstructed. A little above her forestay a small window,
uncurtained and brightly lit, broke the long stretch of featureless black
wall. This was the window of Mr. Benny's inner office, and within, as she
checked her way, catching at the gunwale of one among the tethered boats,
Myra could see the upper half of a hanging lamp and the shadow of its
reflector on the smoky ceiling.

Mr. Benny would be seated under that lamp, no doubt. But how could she
reach him?

The _One-and-All_ lay head-to-stream, and so deep in the water that the
tide all but washed her bulwarks, still grey with the dust of china-stone
as she had come from her loading. Nowadays no British ship so
scandalously overladen would be allowed to put to sea; but the
Plimsoll-mark had not yet been invented to save seamen from their
employers.

She lay so low that Myra, peering into the darkness, could almost se