kin was a
livid patch of purplish paint here and there, upon a crow's-foot ground.
The eyebrows, too, had given in, and narrow lines of Vandyke brown
meandered down Lady Kirkbank's cheeks. The frizzy hair had gone
altogether wrong, and had a wild look, suggestive of the witches in
Macbeth, and the scraggy neck and poor old shoulders showed every year
of their age in the ghastly morning light.

Lesbia waited in the saloon till Lady Kirkbank had bolted herself into
her cabin, and then she went up to the deck wrapped in her satin-lined,
fur-bordered cloak, and coiled herself in a bamboo arm-chair, and
nestled her bare head into a Turkish pillow, and tried to sleep, there
with the cool morning breeze blowing upon her burning forehead, and the
plish-plash of seawater soothing her ear.

There were only three or four sailors on deck, weird, almost
diabolical-looking creatures, Lesbia thought, in striped shirts, with
bare arms, of a shining bronze complexion, flashing black eyes, sleek
raven hair, a sinister look. What species of men they were--Mestizoes,
Coolies, Yucatekes--she knew not, but she felt that they were something
wild and strange, and their presence filled her with a vague fear. _He_,
whose influence now ruled her life, had told her that these men were
born mariners, and that she was twenty times safer with them than when
the yacht had been under the control of those honest, grinning
red-whiskered English Jack Tars. But she liked the English sailors best,
all the same; and she shrank from the faintest contact with these
tawny-visaged strangers, plucking away the train of her gown as they
passed her chair, lest they should brush against her drapery.

On deck this morning, with only those dark faces near, she had a sense
of loneliness, of helplessness, of abandonment even. Unbidden the image
of her home at Grasmere flashed into her mind--all things so calm, so
perfectly ordered, such a sense of safety, of home--no peril, no
temptation, no fever--only peace: and she had grown sick to death of
peace. She had prayed for tempest: and the tempest had come.

There was a heavenly quiet in the air in the early summer morning, only
the creaking of a spar, the scream of a seagull now and then. How pale
the lamps were growing on board the yachts. Paler still, yellow, and
dim, and blurred yonder in the town. The eastward facing windows were
golden with the rising sun. Yes, this was morning. The yachts were
moving away yonder