And, indeed, by one of those atmospheric phenomena more general in the South than elsewhere, the radiant and almost scorching afternoon had suddenly ended, and the evening had come abruptly in the space of a few minutes. The _Jenny_ moved on over a sea without a wave or a ripple. The masts, the yards, and the funnel threw long shadows across the water, and the sun, almost at the edge of the horizon, was no longer warm enough to dissipate the indistinct and chilly vapor that rose and rose, already wetting with its mist drops the brass and woodwork of the deck. And the blue of the still sea deepened into black, while the azure of the clear sky paled and waned. Then, as the disk of the sun touched the horizon abruptly, the immeasurable fire of the sunset burst from the sky over the sea. The coast had disappeared, so that the passengers of the yacht, now returned to the deck, had nothing before them but the water and the sky, two formless immensities over which the light played in its fairy fantasies--here spread in a sheet of tender and transparent rose, like the petals of the eglantine; there rolling in purple waves, the color of bright blood; there stretching like a shore of emerald and amethyst, and farther, built into solid and colossal porticos of gold, and this light opened with the sky, palpitated with the sea, dilated through infinite space, and suddenly as the disk disappeared beneath the waves, this splendor vanished as it came, leaving the sea again a bluish black, and the sky, too, almost black, but with a bar of intense orange on its verge. This bright line vanished in its turn. The earliest stars began to come out, and the yacht lights to appear, illumining the dark mass which went on, bearing into the falling night the heart of a woman which had all day reflected the divine serenity of the bright hours, and which now responded to the melancholy of the rapid and fading twilight.