motionless
by her side, steered, shaping his course by the feel of the wind.
Presently he perceived ahead a ghostly flicker of faint, livid light
which the earth seemed to throw up against the uniform blackness of
the sky. The dinghy was approaching the expanse of the Shallows. The
confused clamour of broken water deepened its note.

"How long are we going to sail like this?" asked Mrs. Travers, gently.
She did not recognize the voice that pronounced the word "Always" in
answer to her question. It had the impersonal ring of a voice without a
master. Her heart beat fast.

"Captain Lingard!" she cried.

"Yes. What?" he said, nervously, as if startled out of a dream.

"I asked you how long we were going to sail like this," she repeated,
distinctly.

"If the breeze holds we shall be in the lagoon soon after daybreak. That
will be the right time, too. I shall leave you on board the hulk with
Jorgenson."

"And you? What will you do?" she asked. She had to wait for a while.

"I will do what I can," she heard him say at last. There was another
pause. "All I can," he added.

The breeze dropped, the sail fluttered.

"I have perfect confidence in you," she said. "But are you certain of
success?"

"No."

The futility of her question came home to Mrs. Travers. In a few hours
of life she had been torn away from all her certitudes, flung into
a world of improbabilities. This thought instead of augmenting her
distress seemed to soothe her. What she experienced was not doubt and
it was not fear. It was something else. It might have been only a great
fatigue.

She heard a dull detonation as if in the depth of the sea. It was hardly
more than a shock and a vibration. A roller had broken amongst the
shoals; the livid clearness Lingard had seen ahead flashed and flickered
in expanded white sheets much nearer to the boat now. And all this--the
wan burst of light, the faint shock as of something remote and immense
falling into ruins, was taking place outside the limits of her
life which remained encircled by an impenetrable darkness and by an
impenetrable silence. Puffs of wind blew about her head and expired;
the sail collapsed, shivered audibly, stood full and still in turn;
and again the sensation of vertiginous speed and of absolute immobility
succeeding each other with increasing swiftness merged at last into
a bizarre state of headlong motion and profound peace. The darkness
enfolded her like the enervating caress of a