off?" he
suggested. "It might be interesting."

She flashed him a look of gay malice. "If we're to believe Mrs.
Ilkington, you're apt to find it more interesting than I. Good night."

"Oh--good night!" he muttered, disturbed; and turned away to the rail.

His troubled vision ranged far to the slowly shifting shore lights. The
big steamship had come very close inshore--as witness the retarded speed
with which she crept toward her anchorage--but still the lights, for all
their singular brightness, seemed distant, incalculably far away; the
gulf of blackness that set them apart exaggerated all distances tenfold.
The cluster of sparks flanked by green and red that marked the hovering
tender appeared to float at an infinite remove, invisibly buoyed upon
the bosom of a fathomless void of night.

Out of this wind-swept waste of impenetrable darkness was to come the
answer to these many questions that perplexed him--perhaps. Something at
least would come to influence him; or else Mrs. Ilkington's promise had
been mere _blague_.... Then what?

Afterwards he assured himself that his stupidity had been unparalleled
inconceivable. And indeed there seems to be some colour of excuse for
this drastic stricture, self-inflicted though it were.

Below him, on the main deck, a squad of deckhands superintended by a
petty officer was rigging out the companion-ladder.

Very suddenly--it seemed, because of the immense quiet that for all its
teeming life enveloped the ship upon the cessation of the engine's
song--the vessel hesitated and then no longer moved. From forward came
the clank of chains as the anchor cables were paid out. Supple to wind
and tide, the Autocratic swung in a wide arc, until the lights of the
tender disappeared from Staff's field of vision.

Before long, however, they swam silently again into sight; then slowly,
cautiously, by almost imperceptible stages the gap closed up until the
tender ranged alongside and made fast to her gigantic sister.

Almost at once the incoming passengers began to mount the
companion-ladder.

Staff promptly abandoned his place at the rail and ran down to the
main-deck. As he approached the doorway opening adjacent to the
companion-ladder he heard a woman's laugh out on the deck: a laugh
which, once heard, was never to be forgotten: clear, sweet, strong,
musical as a peal of fairy bells.

He stopped short; and so did his breath for an instant; and so, he
fancied, did his heart. This