lf to the new situation on
awakening for the first time after a great disaster. It was as though
her mind had already adjusted itself and discounted everything.

She rose up and leaving the oilskin coat and sou'wester on the floor of
the cave came out on to the beach.

The fine weather still held and the day was strong, now lighting the
beach, the sea, and the distant islands through a sky of high, grey
eastward drifting clouds. The boat lay where it had been pulled up, the
tide now coming in and legions of birds were flitting and blowing about
and stalking on the sands as far as eye could reach.

She came to the cave where the men were. Bompard and La Touche lying on
their backs might have been dead but for the sound of their snoring.
Bompard was lying with his wrist across his eyes, La Touche with both
hands beside him, clenched. The tins of beef and the bread bags shewed
vaguely in the gloom behind them.

She stood for a moment watching them and then, turning, she came down to
the boat lying high and dry on the sand. She was trying to realize, that
on the morning of the day before yesterday at this hour she had been
lying in her bunk on board the _Gaston de Paris_, to realize this and
also the fact that her present position seemed scarcely strange.

She ought, so she told herself, to be astonished at what had happened
and to be bewailing her fate, yet, looking back now over yesterday and
the day before, everything seemed part of a level and logical sequence,
almost like the events of a stormy day on board ship. The tragedy of the
destruction of the _Gaston_ only partly experienced could not be fully
felt.

Standing by the boat she tried to realize it and failed, tried to grasp
what she knew to be the horror and pity of it, and failed. She was
neither hard nor insensible, she simply could not grasp it.

And her position here with two rough men, very little food and little
chance of escape, how she would have pitied herself a few days ago could
she have foreseen! Yet here, with the firm sands under her feet and the
wind blowing in her face, reality, instead of hurting her as it had done
in the boat on awakening yesterday morning, soothed her and reassured
her. Everything seemed firm again and the fear that the ugly coast had
raised in her mind had vanished.

She came along the beach looking at the gulls, turned over huge
star-fish and picked up kelp ribbons to examine them. Half a mile or so
from the cave she