e lay without motion on a sea of
oil, heaving slowly, but making not a foot of way.

At ten o'clock that night Emily Vansittart and I stood leaning on the
starboard railing of the poop, with a full moon shining at our backs,
and casting a black shadow of the barque, and of our own two heads, upon
the shining water. From the shadow a broadening path of moonshine
stretched away to the lonely skyline, flickering and shimmering in the
gentle heave of the swell. We were talking with bent heads, chatting of
the calm, of the chances of wind, of the look of the sky, when there
came a sudden plop, like a rising salmon, and there, in the clear light,
John Vansittart sprang out of the water and looked up at us.

I never saw anything clearer in my life than I saw that man. The moon
shone full upon him, and he was but three oars' length away. His face
was more puffed than when I had seen him last, mottled here and there
with dark scabs, his mouth and eyes open as one who is struck with some
overpowering surprise. He had some white stuff streaming from his
shoulders, and one hand was raised to his ear, the other crooked across
his breast. I saw him leap from the water into the air, and in the dead
calm the waves of his coming lapped up against the sides of the vessel.
Then his figure sank back into the water again, and I heard a rending,
crackling sound like a bundle of brushwood snapping in the fire on a
frosty night. There were no signs of him when I looked again, but a
swift swirl and eddy on the still sea still marked the spot where he had
been. How long I stood there, tingling to my finger-tips, holding up an
unconscious woman with one hand, clutching at the rail of the vessel
with the other, was more than I could afterwards tell. I had been noted
as a man of slow and unresponsive emotions, but this time at least I was
shaken to the core. Once and twice I struck my foot upon the deck to be
certain that I was indeed the master of my own senses, and that this was
not some mad prank of an unruly brain. As I stood, still marvelling, the
woman shivered, opened her eyes, gasped, and then standing erect with
her hands upon the rail, looked out over the moonlit sea with a face
which had aged ten years in a summer night.

"You saw his vision?" she murmured.

"I saw something."

"It was he! It was John! He is dead!"

I muttered some lame words of doubt.

"Doubtless he died at this hour," she whispered. "In hospital at
Madeira. I h