‘I will take some soda-water, if you please.’ Odd and far away Dinah’s voice sounded to herself. ‘I am a good sailor in general. I would rather have a rough sea than a smooth one. But this evening I am a little tired. I feel thirsty.’ She drank the soda-water with a sense of refreshment. ‘The wretchedest preparation, without the B., that could be made for a voyage,’ thought the steward, as he stood, salver in hand, waiting for her glass. Then, when the man had again left her alone, she crept back into her place, held her hands tight to her throat to relieve the cruel sensation that well-nigh choked her, and waited. Waited--how long she knew not--perhaps, a short ten minutes only. In recalling the whole scene, later--the swell of the rising water, the murmur of voices in the adjacent cabin, the clinging, overpowering Indian perfume--in summing up, I say, each external detail of that miserable evening, it would afterwards seem to Dinah Arbuthnot that no year of her life ever took so much hard living through as those mortal minutes. At length they came to an end. Doubt was to be set at rest, or turned into yet sharper certainty. For she could tell, first by the muffled thud of rowlocks, then by the splash of oar blades in the water, that the second boat was arriving. She could distinguish Geoffrey’s voice, Lord Rex Basire’s, old Doctor Thorne’s--very loud this last, and didactic, but yielding Dinah’s heart no consolation. Would not Doctor Thorne talk loud and didactically whether his Linda had returned from her quest of him or not? After a time the voices began to disperse. There came the measured yoy-a-hoy of the sailors, the shuffle of feet, the fall of cable on deck. Then Dinah heard the steward saying to one of the boys that they had weighed anchor. And not a moment too soon. With the air so thick, and the glass nohow, the skipper ought to have started, on this badly buoyed coast, a couple of hours ago. A French pilot might be all very well, but to his, the steward’s mind, English daylight was better.