t to Eve de Montalais? Would it
matter to her what success or failure meant to him? Lanyard doubted it,
he doubted her, himself, all things within the compass of his
understanding, and knew appalling glimpses of that everlasting truth,
too passionless to be cynical, that the hopes of man and his fears, his
loves and hates, his strivings and passivity, are all one in the
measured and immutable processes of Time....

The pressure of a hand upon his own roused him to discover the Liane
Delorme had seated herself beside him, in a chair that looked the other
way, so that her face was not far from his; and he could scarcely be
unaware of its hinted beauty, now wan and glimmering in starlight,
enigmatic with soft, close shadows.

"I must have been dreaming," he said, apologetic. "You startled me."

"One could see that, my friend."

The woman spoke in quiet accents and let her hand linger upon his with
its insistent reminder of the warm, living presence whose rich
colouring was disguised by the gloom that encompassed both.

Four strokes in duplicate on the ship's bell, then the call: "_Eight
bells and a-a-all's well_!"

Lanyard muttered: "No idea it was so late."

A slender white shape, Mr. Collison emerged from his quarters in the
deck-house beneath the bridge and ran up the ladder to relieve Mr.
Swain. At the same time a seaman came from forward and ascended by the
other ladder. Later Mr. Swain and the man whose trick at the wheel was
ended left the bridge, the latter to go forward to his rest, Mr. Swain
to turn into his room in the deck-house.

The hot glow of the saloon skylights became a dim refulgence, aside
from which, and its glimmer in the mouth of the companionway, no lights
were visible in the whole length of the ship except the shuttered
window of Mr. Swain's room, which presently was darkened, and odd
glimpses of the binnacle light to be had when the helmsman shifted his
stand.

A profound hush closed down upon the ship, whose progress across the
face of the waters seemed to acquire a new significance of stealth, so
that the two seated by the taffrail, above the throbbing screws and
rushing torrent of the wake, talked in lowered accents without thinking
why.

"It is that one grows bored, eh, cher ami?"

"Perhaps, Liane."

"Or perhaps that one's thought are constantly with one's heart,
elsewhere?"

"You think so?"

"At the Chateau de Montalais, conceivably."

"It amuses you, then, to shoot arrow