hty and fatal struggle was over; she
cared not whether she had conquered or suffered defeat in the struggle
of her soul with some other soul; it was finished, done with, and the
consciousness of its conclusion satisfied and contented her. Gradually
her brain, recovering from its obsession, began to grasp the phenomena
of her surroundings, and she saw that she was on a yacht, and that the
yacht was moving. The motion of the cradle was the smooth rolling of the
vessel; the beat was the beat of its screw; the strange colours were
the cloud tints thrown by the sun as it rose over a distant and receding
shore in the wake of the yacht; her mother's lullaby was the crooned
song of the man at the wheel. Nella all through her life had had many
experiences of yachting. From the waters of the River Hudson to those
bluer tides of the Mediterranean Sea, she had yachted in all seasons and
all weathers. She loved the water, and now it seemed deliciously right
and proper that she should be on the water again. She raised her head to
look round, and then let it sink back: she was fatigued, enervated; she
desired only solitude and calm; she had no care, no anxiety, no
responsibility: a hundred years might have passed since her meeting with
Miss Spencer, and the memory of that meeting appeared to have faded into
the remotest background of her mind.

It was a small yacht, and her practised eye at once told that it
belonged to the highest aristocracy of pleasure craft. As she reclined
in the deck-chair (it did not occur to her at that moment to speculate
as to the identity of the person who had led her therein) she examined
all visible details of the vessel. The deck was as white and smooth as
her own hand, and the seams ran along its length like blue veins. All
the brass-work, from the band round the slender funnel to the concave
surface of the binnacle, shone like gold.

The tapered masts stretched upwards at a rakish angle, and the rigging
seemed like spun silk. No sails were set; the yacht was under steam,
and doing about seven or eight knots. She judged that it was a boat of a
hundred tons or so, probably Clyde-built, and not more than two or three
years old.

No one was to be seen on deck except the man at the wheel: this man wore
a blue jersey; but there was neither name nor initial on the jersey, nor
was there a name on the white life-buoys lashed to the main rigging, nor
on the polished dinghy which hung on the starboard davits. S