ing was easy. The man in the chimney no longer bothered him.
Whoever and whatever he was, he had not shot his bolt soon enough.

Hildegarde von Mitter. He stopped against the rail. The yacht was
burying her nose now, and the white drift from her cut-water seemed
strangely luminous as it swirled obliquely away in the fading twilight.
Hildegarde von Mitter. Was she to be the flaw in the chain? No, no;
there should be no regret; he had steeled his heart against any such
weakness. She had been necessary, and he would be a fool to pause over
a bit of sentimentality. Her appearance had disorganized his nerves,
that was all. Peering into his watch he found that he had only half an
hour before dinner. And it may be added that he dressed with singular
care.

So did Fitzgerald, for that matter.

It took Cathewe just as long, but he did not make two or three
selections of this or that before finding what he wanted. He was
engrossed most of the time in the sober contemplation of the rubber
flooring or the running sea outside the port-hole.

And this night Hildegarde von Mitter was meditating on the last throw
for her hopes. She determined to cast once more the full sun of her
beauty into the face of the man she loved; and if she failed to win,
the fault would not be hers. Why could she not tear out this maddening
heart of hers and fling it to the sea? Why could she not turn it
toward the man who loved her? Why, why? Why should God make her so
unhappy? Why such injustice? Why this twisted interlacing of lives?
And yet, amid all these futile seekings, with subconscious deftness her
hands went on with their appointed work. Never again would the
splendor of her beauty burn as it did this night.

Laura, alone among them all, went serenely about her toilet. She was
young, and love had not yet spread its puzzle before her feet.

As for the others, they were on the far side of the hill, whence the
paths are smooth and gentle and the prospect is peacefulness and the
retrospect is dimly rosal. They dressed as they had done those twenty
odd years, plainly.

On the bridge the first officer was standing at the captain's side.

"Captain," he shouted, "where did you get that Frenchman?"

"Picked him up day before yestiddy. Speaks fair English an' a bit o'
Dago. They're allus handy on a pleasure-boat. He c'n keep off th'
riffraff boatmen. An' _you_ know what persistent cusses they be in the
Med'terranean. Why?"