suggested that she should be cast over. She ballasted the
boat, and for Bompard she was something to lean against.

The French mercantile marine is divided into two great classes, the
northerners and southerners. The man from the north is a Ponantaise, the
man from the south a Moco.

Bompard was a Moco, La Touche a Ponantaise. They talked and talked,
repeating themselves, cursing the "hooker," the Bridge and the
steersman. Once La Touche, grown hysterical, seemed choking against
tears.

Then after a while, conversation died out. They had nothing more to talk
about. The boat rode easy. There was nothing to do, and these men blunt
to life and sea-hardened so that to them all things came in the hour's
work, nodded off, La Touche curled up in the bow, Bompard with his
grizzled head on the breast of Mademoiselle de Bromsart.

CHAPTER VI

DAWN

The girl was not dead as Bompard imagined, she had been stunned and had
passed from that condition into the pseudo-sleep that follows profound
excitement.

She was awakened by a flick of spray on her face, a touch from the great
sea that had claimed her for its own.

Lying as she was she could see nothing but the ribbed sides of the boat,
the grey sky above, and a gull with domed wings and down-curved head,
poised, as though suspended on the end of a string. It screamed at her,
shifted its position, and then passed, as though blown away on the wind.
She sat up. Bompard had drawn away from her and was lying curled up on
his side. La Touche on his back, forward, shewed nothing but his knees;
across the gunnel lay the sea, desolate in the dawn, turbulent, yet
hard and mournful as a view of slated roofs after rain.

She had never seen the sea so close before, she had never smelt its
heart and the savour of its soul; bitter, fresh, new and ever renewed by
the blowing wind.

The whole tragedy of the night was alive in her mind as a picture, but
it seemed the picture of what another person had seen. Her past life,
her own personality, seemed vague and unconnected with her as the past
life and personality of another person. This was reality. Reality new,
terrific, pungent as that which the soul may experience on awakening
after death.

She knew, as though the desolate sea had told her, that the great yacht
was gone and everyone on board of her; yet the fact, perhaps from its
very enormity, failed to realize itself fully in her mind. Then, in a
flash and horribly clearly,