I was bent on getting ahead of
her."

"I didn't hear you shouting to the fellows on deck," said La Touche,
"but I heard you shouting to me to row. Then when we'd got her away a
bit the _Gaston_ blew up."

"Blew up," said the girl.

"The boilers," said Bompard, "they lifted the decks off her. She must
have gone like a stone."

"So you think no one at all escaped but us?"

Neither of the men replied for a moment, then La Touche said: "There
wasn't another boat could have got away."

The sun was well risen now, the clouds were high and breaking and the
far away land shewed up, vast in the distance, with a white line of
snow-covered peaks against the sky, desolate as when Kerguelen first
sighted them.

Cleo with her eyes fixed across the leagues of tumbling tourmaline
tinted sea almost forgot the others. That was the place where the wind
was bearing them to, a place where there was nothing. Neither hotels nor
houses nor huts, nor men nor women, a place where no landing-stage would
receive them, no voice welcome them. Her throat worked for a second
convulsively as she battled with the quite new things that the far off
mountains were telling her.

It was now and not till now that she recognised fully what Fate had done
to her. It was now and not till now that she saw Time before her as a
thing from which all the known features had been deleted.

"Mademoiselle's bath is quite ready."

"Mademoiselle, the first gong has sounded."

Oh, the day--the day with its hundred phases and divisions, the
breakfast hour, the luncheon hour, the hour that brought afternoon tea,
the dresses that went with each phase, the emotions and interests, and
changing forms of being, the day which made a person change to its light
and the person of ten o'clock in the morning quite different from the
person of noon--this thing which we talk of as the day appeared before
her now as what it really is, life itself, as civilized men know life, a
thing outside ourselves yet of ourselves and without which the circling
of the sun is as the circling of a pointer on a blank dial--. This thing
was gone.

La Touche had got more forward and was smoking and, though the wind was
with them, a faint scent of tobacco smoke came on the spill of the wind
from the sail. Bompard was chewing, spitting occasionally to starboard
and wiping his mouth with the back of his bronzed tattooed hand.

The vague scent of the tobacco threaded up all sorts of things in the