illiams advanced, muttering tremendously. "They are
not going round the world. Dare say get ashore in time for supper."

He stared through her without expression, as if she had been thin air,
but she seized his arm, of course, and he gave me, then, an amazingly
rapid wink which, I suppose, meant that I should go....

"All right there?" asked Sebright from above, as soon as I had taken my
seat in the stern sheets by the side of Seraphina. He was standing on
the poop deck ready with a sign for letting go the end of our painter
on deck; but before I could answer in the affirmative, Castro, ensconced
forward under his hat, drew his ready blade across the rope, as it were
a throat.

At once a narrow strip of water opened between the boat and the ship,
and our long-prepared departure, hastened thus by half a second, seemed
to strike everybody dumb with surprise, as if we had taken wings to
ourselves to fly away. Hastily I grasped the tiller to give the boat a
sheer, and heard a sort of loud gasp in the air above. A row of heads,
posed on chins all along the rail, stared after us with unanimous
fixity. Mrs. Williams averted her face on her husband's shoulder. Behind
the couple, Sebright raised his cap gravely.

Our little sail filled to a breeze which was much too feeble to produce
a perceptible effect on the ship, and we left behind us her towering
form, as one recedes from a tall white spire on a plain. I laid the
boat's head straight for the dwarf headland, marking the mouth of the
inlet on the interminable range of sand-dunes. We drove on with a smart
ripple, but before we felt sufficiently settled to exchange a few words
the animated sound languished suddenly, paused altogether, and, with
a renewed murmur under our feet seemed to lose itself below the glassy
waters.

CHAPTER SEVEN

The calm had returned. The sea, changing from the warm glitter of a
gem, and attuned to the grays and blacks of space, resembled a monstrous
cinder under a sky of ashes.

The sun had disappeared, smothered in these clouds that had formed
themselves all at once and everywhere, like some swift corruption of
the upper air. For the best part of the afternoon the ship and the boat
remained lying at right angles, within half a mile of each other. What
light was left in the world, cut off from the source of life, seemed to
sicken with a strange decay. The long stretch of sands and the sails of
the motionless vessel stood out lividly pale