I was standing with my back to the companion hatch; my eyes were rooted upon the white form which in a few moments now would be tilted and sent flashing with a heavy cannon-ball at its feet into the black depths on which we were floating. The man, in life, had acted a scoundrel’s part, and had richly merited the end he had met; but he lay dead; his grave was this mighty wilderness of waters; not a hole in the earth to which those who mourned him could repair and say, pointing downwards, ‘What remains of him is here;’ but a tomb rivalling the heavens in immensity, a material eternity that would absorb him and his memory as though his form, waiting there to be launched, was but a drop of the dew that glittered in the moonshine upon the grating that supported him. That bundle was a text to fill me with melancholy musings, and I was thinking of the man as I beheld him in the morning, worn indeed by shipwreck and privation, but stately, erect, soldierly; his cheek crimsoning to the blow that Wilfrid had dealt him; life and passion strong in him; when I was startled out of my thoughts by Finn ceasing to read. I glanced at him and observed that he was peering over the top of his book, goggling some object with eyes that protruded from their sockets. I looked to see what had called off his attention, and remarked a tall female figure attired in a light dress, but with her face concealed by a long dark veil, standing close beside the head of the grating, perfectly motionless, save for such movements as came to her by the swaying of the yacht. She had appeared amongst us with the stealthiness of a ghost, and she looked like one in that conflicting light, with the faint gleam of her eyes showing through the veil, and the stitched-up form on the grating to give a darker and more thrilling accentuation to her presence than she could have got from an empty grave or a ruptured coffin. The sailors backed away from her, shouldering one another into the gloom with much wiping of their leather lips upon the backs of their hands. I was startled on beholding her, but quickly rallied to a sense of deep disgust that possessed me on contrasting this illustration of emotion with her language and treatment of Wilfrid that morning. ‘Proceed,’ I exclaimed to Finn. ‘Read on man, and shorten the service, too, if you can.’