Without a second's delay, despite her twenty-seven years, she has sprung forwards to obey the summons; and Jim has the sense to make no further effort to rejoin her. By the time that their circuit is finished, and they have again reached the front of the church, vespers are ended, and there is a movement outwards among the worshippers. They stream--not very numerous--out on the little terrace. The priests follow, tonsured, but--which looks strange--with beards and whiskers. The acolytes, in their red chasubles, carry a black and white pall, and lay it over the memorial stone below the cross. On either hand stand a band of decently clad youths--sons of drowned seamen--playing on brass instruments. It is a poor little music, doubtfully in tune; but surely no rolling organ, no papal choir, could touch the heart so much as this simple ceremonial. The little Latin cross standing sheer out against the sea; the black pall thrown over the stone that commemorates the sea's innumerable dead; the red-clad acolytes, standing with eyes cast down, holding aloft their high tapers, whose flickering flame the sea-wind soon puffs out; and the sons of the drowned sailors, making their homely music to the accompaniment of the salt breeze. The little service is brief and those who have taken part in it are soon dispersing. As they do so, Jim once more finds himself for a moment close to Elizabeth. The sun has nearly touched the sea-line by this time, and he sees, or thinks he sees, her shiver. "You are cold," he says solicitously; "you will get a chill." She looks back at him, half surprised, half grateful, at the anxiety of his tone. "Not I!" she answers, with a gentle air of indifference and recklessness; "naught never comes to harm!" "But you shivered! I saw you shiver." "Did I? It was only"--smiling--"that a goose walked over my grave. Does a goose never walk over your grave?" And once more she is gone. He does not see her again that day. Of the three places laid for dinner at the round table in the _salle à manger_, only two are occupied; hers is, and remains, empty. She is not with her parents, and, what is more, she does not appear to be missed by them. It fills Jim with something of the same shocked surprise as he had felt on hearing the cold and surly tone in which she had been addressed by her father, to see how much more, and more genially, that father talks; how much less morose his back looks than had been the case on the previous evening.