with the
steady overbearing glare of the silent head-piece above. He turned us
out most unnecessarily at an ungodly hour, but it was nearly eleven
in the morning before he brought me up a cable's length from Hermann's
ship. And he did it very badly too, in a hurry, and nearly contriving to
miss altogether the patch of good holding ground, because, forsooth,
he had caught sight of Hermann's niece on the poop. And so did I; and
probably as soon as he had seen her himself. I saw the modest, sleek
glory of the tawny head, and the full, grey shape of the girlish print
frock she filled so perfectly, so satisfactorily, with the seduction of
unfaltering curves--a very nymph of Diana the Huntress. And Diana the
ship sat, high-walled and as solid as an institution, on the smooth
level of the water, the most uninspiring and respectable craft upon the
seas, useful and ugly, devoted to the support of domestic virtues like
any grocer's shop on shore. At once Falk steamed away; for there was
some work for him to do. He would return in the evening.

He ranged close by us, passing out dead slow, without a hail. The beat
of the paddle-wheels reverberating amongst the stony islets, as if from
the ruined walls of a vast arena, filled the anchorage confusedly with
the clapping sounds of a mighty and leisurely applause. Abreast of
Hermann's ship he stopped the engines; and a profound silence reigned
over the rocks, the shore and the sea, for the time it took him to raise
his hat aloft before the nymph of the grey print frock. I had snatched
up my binoculars, and I can answer for it she didn't stir a limb,
standing by the rail shapely and erect, with one of her hands grasping a
rope at the height of her head, while the way of the tug carried slowly
past her the lingering and profound homage of the man. There was for me
an enormous significance in the scene, the sense of having witnessed
a solemn declaration. The die was cast. After such a manifestation he
couldn't back out. And I reflected that it was nothing whatever to me
now. With a rush of black smoke belching suddenly out of the funnel, and
a mad swirl of paddle-wheels provoking a burst of weird and precipitated
clapping, the tug shot out of the desolate arena. The rocky islets lay
on the sea like the heaps of a cyclopean ruin on a plain; the centipedes
and scorpions lurked under the stones; there was not a single blade
of grass in sight anywhere, not a single lizard sunning himself on a