ders are
a child-like race, and from his post at the foot of the deserted
accommodation ladder the Commandant could hear them laughing,
exclaiming, chattering with the passengers in high-pitched voices.

He stood with his boat-hook, holding on by the grating of the ladder's
lowest step, and stared at the gray wall-sides of the liner. Yes, the
ship was solid, and yet he could not believe but that she belonged to a
dream; so mysteriously, against all chances, was she here, out of the
deep and the night.

Someone had lashed a lantern at the head of the ladder. Lifting his
eyes to it in the foggy darkness, the Commandant saw a solitary figure
standing there in the gangway and looking down on him--a woman.

She lifted a hand as if to enjoin silence, and came swiftly down a step
or two in the shadow of the vessel's side.

"You are Major Vigoureux?" she asked in a quick whisper, leaning
forward over him.

"At your service, madam," he stammered, taken fairly aback.

"Ah! I am glad of that!" She ran down the remaining steps and set her
foot lightly on the boat's gunwale. "You will row me ashore?"

"If you wish it, madam." He was more puzzled than ever. He saw that she
wore a dark cloak of fur and was bare-headed. She spoke in a sort of
musical whisper. Her face he could not see. "In a minute or two my
men----"

"We will not wait for your men," she said, quietly, seating herself in
the stern sheets. "They can easily be put ashore--can they not?--in one
of the other boats."

From under her fur cloak she reached out an arm--a bare arm with two
jewelled bracelets--and took the tiller. "I can steer you to the quay,"
she said, and leaning forward in the light of Sergeant Archelaus'
lantern, she lifted her eyes to the Commandant.

The Commandant pushed off, shipped the paddles into the thole pins, and
began to row, as in a dream.

CHAPTER VI

HOW VASHTI CAME TO THE ISLANDS

"You do not remember me, Major Vigoureux?"

The Commandant looked at her, across the lantern's ray. Something in
her voice, vibrating like the rich, full note of a bell, touched his
memory ... but only to elude it.

The face that challenged him was not girlish; the face, rather, of a
beautiful woman of thirty; its shape a short oval, with a slight
squareness at the point of the jaw to balance the broad forehead over
which her hair (damp now, but rippled with a natural wave, defying the
fog) lay parted in two heavy bands--the brow of a god