oily
bubbles in her wake. Again the impulse would fail her, and she would
lie still among the palpitating jellyfish, perfectly reflected in the
water beneath her; but carried steadily on by the silent shoreward
swelling of the tide.

Major Kent sat at the tiller smoking. He was in that mood of vacant
obliviousness of the ordinary affairs of life which long drifting on
calm seas induces. The helplessness of man in a sailing-ship, when the
wind fails him, begets a kind of fatalistic acceptance of the
inevitable, which is the nearest thing to peace that any of us ever
attain. Indeed to drift along the tide is peace, and no conviction of
the inevitableness of the worries which lurk in ambush for us on the
land has any power to break the spell.

Meldon lay stretched on the deck outside the combing of the cockpit.
Nirvana had no attraction for him. He resented forced inactivity as an
unendurable wrong. Instead of smoking with half-closed eyes, he peered
eagerly forward under the sail. He noted everything--the floating
gulls and puffins, the stiff, wild-eyed cormorants, the jelly-fish, the
whirling eddies of the tide. As the yacht drifted on, or was driven
forward by the occasional faint puffs of air, he hissed through his
teeth in the way known to sailors as whistling for a breeze. He gazed
long and steadily at the beach beyond the _Spindrift's_ moorings.

"I think," he said at last, "that there is a man on the shore, and he
looks to me very much as if he was waiting for us."

Major Kent made no answer. His feeling was that the man who waited
might be left to wait without speculation about his purpose. Guessing
at the possible business of an unknown and distant man is a form of
mental exertion very distasteful to any one who has entered into the
calm joy of drifting home after sunset. But Meldon was a man of
incurably active mind. He was deeply interested in the solitary figure
on the beach. The yacht was borne very slowly on, and it became
possible at last to distinguish the figure of the waiter more clearly.

"He looks to me," said Meldon a few minutes later, "very like that
fellow Callaghan, the Ballymoy House gardener."

There was another pause. A puff of wind, the last vital rally of the
expiring breeze, carried the _Spindrift_ forward till the punt at her
moorings lay almost under her bow.

"It is Callaghan," said Meldon, "and there's only one thing which can
possibly bring him here at this hour.