t his love was so great as to be in a sense
cowardly. The effects of a great passion are unaccountable. It has
been known to make a man timid. But Hermann looked at me as if I had
foolishly raved; and the twilight was dying out rapidly.

"You don't believe in passion, do you, Hermann?" I said cheerily. "The
passion of fear will make a cornered rat courageous. Falk's in a corner.
He will take her off your hands in one thin frock just as she came to
you. And after ten years' service it isn't a bad bargain," I added.

Far from taking offence, he resumed his air of civic virtue. The sudden
night came upon him while he stared placidly along the deck, bringing in
contact with his thick lips, and taking away again after a jet of smoke,
the curved mouthpiece fitted to the stem of his pipe. The night came
upon him and buried in haste his whiskers, his globular eyes, his puffy
pale face, his fat knees and the vast flat slippers on his fatherly
feet. Only his short arms in respectable white shirt-sleeves remained
very visible, propped up like the flippers of a seal reposing on the
strand.

"Falk wouldn't settle anything about repairs. Told me to find out first
how much wood I should require and he would see," he remarked; and after
he had spat peacefully in the dusk we heard over the water the beat of
the tug's floats. There is, on a calm night, nothing more suggestive of
fierce and headlong haste than the rapid sound made by the paddle-wheels
of a boat threshing her way through a quiet sea; and the approach of
Falk towards his fate seemed to be urged by an impatient and passionate
desire. The engines must have been driven to the very utmost of their
revolutions. We heard them slow down at last, and, vaguely, the white
hull of the tug appeared moving against the black islets, whilst a slow
and rhythmical clapping as of thousands of hands rose on all sides. It
ceased all at once, just before Falk brought her up. A single brusque
splash was followed by the long drawn rumbling of iron links running
through the hawse pipe. Then a solemn silence fell upon the Roadstead.

"He will soon be here," I murmured, and after that we waited for him
without a word. Meantime, raising my eyes, I beheld the glitter of a
lofty sky above the Diana's mastheads. The multitude of stars gathered
into clusters, in rows, in lines, in masses, in groups, shone all
together, unanimously--and the few isolated ones, blazing by themselves
in the midst of dark