e life was false and the far beach a dream.

Raft at a dinner party! Raft at one of those elegant afternoons where
the talk would run on the politics of the moment, on symbolism, on
Bergson, or Iturrino or the works of Othon Friesz--! He could not be her
companion in that place, in that atmosphere, within leagues of those
people.

She was not thinking that now. "These people" around her seemed
strangers; they had in fact always been strangers, strangers who had
kissed her, conversed with her, dined with her, but strangers; the one,
true, living, warm friend, the only one she had ever known, was Raft. It
was the penguins and sea-bulls over again, the polite, bowing,
absolutely correct penguins, the warm lumping, living sea-bulls.

Her heart, chilled by stephanotis-scented kisses, words of felicitation
and the fat smiles of men in tall hats and tight-buttoned overcoats,
chilled by Monsieur de Brie's gold rimmed eye glasses, chilled by a
social state that had never warmed her, cried out for Raft. Kerguelen
and that beach, where, even now, the sea-bulls might be lingering,
seemed a warm and blissful vision, real, alive, a place where life meant
living.

Ah, here he came. He had been helping to fix a hawser at the bows. She
ran towards him.

"Ah, there you are. Now, you are coming with me. I have told the captain
and he said this morning it would be all right as you were not signed
on."

"Right," said Raft, "but where are you going?"

"To an hotel."

He looked about him. He saw the crowd on deck but he did not connect it
with her. He was out of his reckoning. He had never thought of what
would happen in port as regarded her, or where he would go or what he
would do; making plans was not in his way. In the ordinary course of
things he would have gone to the British consulate and the Shipwrecked
Mariners' people would have returned him, carriage paid, to England. He
had always been in the hands of others and of chance.

She--he had always called her She, and here, be it said, he did not know
her name, never having asked--She had now taken him into her hands and
he felt vaguely that she was a power on this new beach where he was
stranded.

Had you told him that she was a woman of society and very wealthy his
idea of her power would not have been increased; he knew nothing of
wealth or society. She was She in her old dress that he knew so well,
and still carrying the sou'wester he had fetched from the cave where she