ous shrinking.

They stopped by the rails presently, looking out upon the tumbling seas
that rolled out of the sliding haze tipped with livid froth, and the
dreariness of the surroundings intensified the girl's depression.
There was something unpleasantly suggestive in the sight of the fog
that hid everything, for she had of late been troubled with a
half-apprehensive longing to see what lay before her. In the
meanwhile, she noticed the look-out standing, a lonely, shapeless
figure, amidst the spray that whirled about the plunging bows. By and
bye she saw him turn and wave an arm apparently towards the bridge
behind her, and she heard a hoarse, wind-out cry. What it meant she
could not tell, but in another moment the _Scarrowmania's_ whistle
shrieked again.

Then a grey shape burst out of the vapour, and grew with astonishing
swiftness into dim tiers of slanted sailcloth swaying above a strip of
hull that moved amidst a broad white smear of foam. It was a brig
under fore-course and topsails, and as Agatha watched her she sank to
her tilted bowsprit, and a big grey and white sea foamed about her bows.

"Aren't we dreadfully near?" she asked.

Wyllard did not answer. He was gazing up at the bridge, and once more
the whistle hurled out a great warning blast. It hardly seemed to her
that the two vessels could pass clear of each other. Then Wyllard laid
a hand upon her shoulder.

"The skipper's starboarding. We'll go round her stern," he said.

His grasp was reassuring, and she watched the straining curves of
canvas and line of half-submerged hull. It rose with streaming bows,
swung high above the sea, sank again, and vanished with bewildering
suddenness into a belt of driving fog. She was not sure that there had
been any peril, but it was certainly over now, and she was rather
puzzled by her sensations when Wyllard had held her shoulder. For one
thing, she had felt instinctively that she was safe with him. She,
however, decided not to trouble herself about the reason for this, and
by and bye she looked up at him. The expression she had already
noticed was once more in his face.

"I don't think you like the fog any more than I do," she said.

"No," said Wyllard, with a quiet forcefulness that almost startled her.
"I hate it."

"Why do you go as far as that?"

"It recalls something that still gives me a very bad few minutes every
now and then. It has been worrying me again to-night."

"I wonder," s