But the world could not understand that, and Raft to the world was a
rough sailor man, and she, to the world, was Cleo de Bromsart.

She would lie awake at night listening to the pounding of the screws and
thinking of this--contrasting the figure of Raft with the world she knew
and the world she knew with the figure of Raft.

Madame de Brie, her nearest relation, would pass before her mind's eye
with her gold eye glasses, and the Comtesse de Mirandole and a host of
others; and the queer thing was that the vaguest feeling of antagonism
tinged her mind towards these estimable people. They seemed forgeries,
impudent forgeries of the handwriting that had first written the word
Man on the earth. She had seen the original writing.

She felt also towards them the antagonism of the child to the grown up,
and of the person who can't explain to the person who stands waiting
for an explanation.

Then she would laugh quietly to herself, for no woman, surely, was ever
in a similar position. Then, casting her mind back, she would sometimes
choke a little with tears in her throat, tears for herself, dying of
loneliness, and for the hand that had brought her back from death.

They passed the entrance of the straits and Gibraltar, and one bright
blue winter's morning they entered the harbour of Marseilles, with
Marseilles before them blazing in the sun and the bugles of Fort St.
Jean answering the crying of the gulls and the drums of Fort St.
Nicholas.

Cleo was dressed in the same clothes she had worn on her escape from the
_Gaston de Paris_. She had borrowed a hat from one of the ladies on
board and stockings and other things from another lady; but she still
wore round her waist the leather belt with the empty knife sheath.

As she stood on deck, now, waiting whilst the _Carcassonne_ berthed at
the wharf alongside a great Messagerie steamer, she carried over her arm
the oilskin coat and, by its elastic band, the sou'wester. They were old
friends.

Then when the hawsers had been passed and the gang plank was being run
out she saw amongst the crowd on the wharf Monsieur de Brie and Madame
de Brie, also a number of well-dressed people, Parisians some of them.

Then she was being embraced by Madame de Brie and trying at the same
time to acknowledge the salute of Monsieur Bonvalot, her lawyer and man
of affairs, a stout pale man with long Dundreary whiskers who had come
from Paris to receive her.

All this crowd had not come p