ils close rigged in the freshening wind, they were running parallel
with the Cliff--"THE Cliff!" thought Mahony with a curl of the lip. And
indeed there was no other; nothing but low scrub-grown sandhills which
flattened out till they were almost level with the sea.

The passage through the Heads was at hand. Impulsively he went down to
fetch Mary. Threading his way through the saloon, in the middle of
which grew up one of the masts, he opened a door leading off it.

"Come on deck, my dear, and take your last look at the old place. It's
not likely you'll ever see it again."

But Mary was already encoffined in her narrow berth.

"Don't ask me even to lift my head from the pillow, Richard. Besides,
I've seen it so often before."

He lingered to make some arrangements for her comfort, fidgeted to know
where she had put his books; then mounted a locker and craned his neck
at the porthole. "Now for the Rip, wife! By God, Mary, I little thought
this time last year, that I should be crossing it to-day."

But the cabin was too dark and small to hold him. Climbing the steep
companion-way he went on deck again, and resumed his flittings to and
fro. He was no more able to be still than was the good ship under him;
he felt himself one with her, and gloried in her growing unrest. She
was now come to the narrow channel between two converging headlands,
where the waters of Hobson's Bay met those of the open sea. They boiled
and churned, in an eternal commotion, over treacherous reefs which
thrust far out below the surface and were betrayed by straight, white
lines of foam. Once safely out, the vessel hove to to drop the pilot.
Leaning over the gunwale Mahony watched a boat come alongside, the man
of oilskins climb down the rope-ladder and row away.

Here, in the open, a heavy swell was running, but he kept his foot on
the swaying boards long after the last of his fellow-passengers had
vanished--a tall, thin figure, with an eager, pointed face, and hair
just greying at the temples. Contrary to habit, he had a word for every
one who passed, from mate to cabin-boy, and he drank a glass of wine
with the Captain in his cabin. Their start had been auspicious, said
the latter; seldom had he had such a fair wind to come out with.

Then the sun fell into the sea and it was night--a fine, starry night,
clear with the hard, cold radiance of the south. Mahony looked up at
the familiar constellations and thought of those others, long missed