The leaden curtain had drawn far down into the west; two-thirds of the heavens now were a dazzle of silver blue with a high sun looking down out of it with a roasting eye, and the water a surface of shivering glory south and east and edged crape-like in the west, but not a cloud of the size of a thumb-nail anywhere save there. A thin line of surf purred delicately upon the gradual slope of sulphur-lined beach, with a weak, metallic hissing sounding along the length of it as the sparkling ripple slipped up and down upon the honeycombed beach. The remains of the yacht’s bows lay gaunt and motionless some distance down. Her gilt figure-head glowed in the sunshine and made a brightness under it that rode like a fragment of sunbeam upon the delicate lift of sea rolling inwards. A plank or two rounding into the stern were gone and you could see daylight through her. It seemed incredible that so stout a little craft should have gone to pieces as she had; but then the swell had been heavy and the ground on which she beat iron-hard, and then again her scantling was but that of a pleasure vessel, though the staunchest of its kind. Meanwhile I conveyed, with the help of Cutbill, into the shadow that was cast by the galleon, as I will call her, Laura’s box of wearing apparel which we had fallen in with early in the morning. Oddly enough it was the only trunk or portmanteau that had come ashore. Some sailors’ chests had floated in, but nothing belonging to any of us aft saving this box of Laura’s and a small chest of drawers out of Wilfrid’s cabin, one drawer gone, and the others containing articles of no use to us, such as gloves, neck-ties, writing material, manuscripts sodden and illegible. The removing her clothes from the box and spreading them to dry found Laura occupation and something else therefore to think of than our miserable condition. Her sister very early had withdrawn to the shadow cast by the galleon, and there sat--Johnson lying a little way from her--apparently stirless for a whole half-hour together; as much a fossil to the eye as the wondrous structure that sheltered her. The black cloud of hair upon her back, her spectral white face and dark eyes gave me an odd fancy of her as the figure-head of the mysterious fabric that had risen in thunder and flame from the green stillness of its ocean tomb where it had been lying so long that the mere thought of the years put a shiver into one, spite of the broiling orb that hung overhead. Heavens! I remember thinking in some interval of toil, during which I paused, panting, with my eye directed towards the galleon--figure a lonely man coming ashore here on a moonlit night and beholding that woman seated as she now sits, looking as she now looks, stirless as she now is, in the shadow of that shell-covered structure shimmering like a lunar rainbow to the moonbeam!