huge harmless
things around her, that a hatred of La Touche came into her mind, a
hatred that seemed to have been waiting to enter until her mind was at
rest. He seemed to her evil itself. He seemed to her connected with all
the disasters that had happened and part of them. He had been the
lookout on the _Gaston de Paris_, his quarrel had sent Bompard to his
death, he had nearly unhinged her mind with terror. Had he possessed the
evil eye? Then, for the first time, she recalled her premonition of
disaster, yet, how she had refused to let the yacht be put off its
course. They might now have been at New Amsterdam only for that. Yet it
was not her fault. She had refused to alter the course, not for any
selfish reason, quite the reverse, she had refused because she did not
wish to spoil the plans of her host. It was Fate, not blind Fate,
because the premonition was full sighted, it was Fate obeying some
order. And it seemed to her that she could read in the order that she
was to be saved. Why? God only knew, but so she read the facts, and she
would be saved to the end and go back to the life she knew, or had known
and die, perhaps, at last an old, old woman.

It seemed to her that this coming on to the sea elephant beach was a
stage in her great journey that had brought her definitely nearer to the
end of her loneliness. And whether all this were true knowledge or
whether it was only the fancy of the ego its effect was to give her
peace.

Then, as she sat there the strangest lonely figure on earth, she
explored the pocket of her skirt and took the things from it. La
Touche's knife, her rings knotted up in her handkerchief, the tobacco
box of Captain Slocum, the tinder-box and box of matches. Then she
opened the tobacco box and re-read the purple writing with the tag "keep
up your spirits." She could not visualize the old slab-sided whaling
captain who had scrawled that, inspired no doubt by practical knowledge
of disaster and the horrors of Kerguelen, but the message came now as an
additional comfort, it seemed to her written by a hand other than that
of man. She put the paper back in the box and, then, everything back in
her pocket.

Then, like a stroke of humour, an incident occurred to lighten the whole
beach.

A big platoon of penguins had crossed the river and marched up to the
sacred precincts of the seal beach. Turning her head to see what the
disturbance was about she sighted the penguins just at the end of the