Whilst Captain Puncheon waited for the yacht’s boat to haul alongside Sir Wilfrid sent for a box of cigars which he presented to the old chap. The gift produced such a grin that I saw some of the hands forward turn their backs upon us to conceal their mirth. ‘Do you think, captain,’ exclaimed Wilfrid, once more rendered almost alarmingly convulsive in his movements by the excitement that filled him, ‘that there are men aboard your vessel who took note of more than you did in the yacht’s appearance? If so----’ But Puncheon interrupted him by saying that he was the only man who examined the schooner through a glass, and therefore neither his mate nor any of the seamen who were on deck at the time could possibly have observed her so fully as he. ‘Make haste and return,’ bawled my cousin to the fellows in the boat as they shoved off with the grinning old skipper in the stern sheets. ‘Every moment is precious,’ he muttered, walking briskly in short turns opposite Miss Jennings and me. ‘To think of them sneaking along like the shadow of a cloud, hey!’ he sent a wildly impatient look aloft and brought his foot with a heavy stamp to the deck. ‘It is the “Shark” then?’ whispered Miss Jennings. ‘No doubt of it,’ I answered. She glanced at me as if she had been wounded and her lips turned pale. Well, thought I, anticipation, to be sure, is often the worst part of an affair of this sort, but if the mere hearing of the ‘Shark’ affects this little sweetheart so violently, how will the sighting of the craft serve her, and the boarding of her, if ever it comes to it? In a few minutes the yacht’s boat was returning, whilst you saw the figure of old Puncheon clambering out of his main chains over the bulwarks of the ‘Wanderer.’ A little later and there were hands tailing on to the falls, the boat rising dripping to the davits, and the foretopsail yard slowly pointing its arm to the wind; then, to the full weight of the breeze sweeping red with the sunset into her hollowed canvas, the ‘Bride’ leaned down, sullenly shouldering the swell into foam with the first stubborn push of her bows, till gathering way she was once more swinging into the west and south with the gloom of the evening growing into a windy vagueness on her lee-beam, whilst on the weather quarter, black as indigo against the dull western redness, was the figure of the barque rolling with filled maintopsail over the long Atlantic heavings, and rapidly diminishing into the fragile beauty of some exquisitely carved toy of ebony wood on the skirts of the rising and falling fan-shaped stretch of seething paleness that marked the limits of the ‘Bride’s’ wake.