he called
to the man, and called again, in a feeble voice, but the steerer took
no notice of her, and continued his quiet song as though nothing else
existed in the universe save the yacht, the sea, the sun, and himself.

Then her eyes swept the outline of the land from which they were
hastening, and she could just distinguish a lighthouse and a great white
irregular dome, which she recognized as the Kursaal at Ostend, that
gorgeous rival of the gaming palace at Monte Carlo. So she was leaving
Ostend. The rays of the sun fell on her caressingly, like a restorative.
All around the water was changing from wonderful greys and dark blues to
still more wonderful pinks and translucent unearthly greens; the magic
kaleidoscope of dawn was going forward in its accustomed way, regardless
of the vicissitudes of mortals.

Here and there in the distance she descried a sail--the brown sail of
some Ostend fishing-boat returning home after a night's trawling.
Then the beat of paddles caught her ear, and a steamer blundered past,
wallowing clumsily among the waves like a tortoise. It was the Swallow
from London. She could see some of its passengers leaning curiously over
the aft-rail. A girl in a mackintosh signalled to her, and mechanically
she answered the salute with her arm. The officer of the bridge of the
Swallow hailed the yacht, but the man at the wheel offered no reply. In
another minute the Swallow was nothing but a blot in the distance.

Nella tried to sit straight in the deck-chair, but she found herself
unable to do so. Throwing off the rug which covered her, she discovered
that she had been tied to the chair by means of a piece of broad
webbing. Instantly she was alert, awake, angry; she knew that her perils
were not over; she felt that possibly they had scarcely yet begun.
Her lazy contentment, her dreamy sense of peace and repose, vanished
utterly, and she steeled herself to meet the dangers of a grave and
difficult situation.

Just at that moment a man came up from below. He was a man of forty or
so, clad in irreproachable blue, with a peaked yachting cap. He raised
the cap politely.

'Good morning,' he said. 'Beautiful sunrise, isn't it?' The clever and
calculated insolence of his tone cut her like a lash as she lay bound in
the chair. Like all people who have lived easy and joyous lives in those
fair regions where gold smoothes every crease and law keeps a tight hand
on disorder, she found it hard to realize that