The _Cypriani_ rattled and wheezed, and her speed sharply slackened, but he did not notice it. His mind fastened on the stark fact of his impotence like a key in a lock: his heart leapt up to meet it. He turned slowly and looked at her. She leaned lightly upon the rail, her eyes on the water, her lashes on her cheek like a silken veil. At her breast nodded his favor, the _Cypriani's_ perfect rose. In her youth, her beauty, and, most of all, her innocent helplessness, there was something indescribably wistful, indescribably compelling: it sprang at him and possessed him. Even in permitting him her acquaintance, she had trusted him far past what he had any right to expect; and now, with his own sickening game at the touch, she gave this crowning proof of confidence in him--dashing it full in the face of the whispering and hinting Higginson, full in his own face too. Could anything in all the world matter beside the fact that this girl believed in him, that she had trusted him not only against convention, not only against his cowardly enemy, but last and biggest, _against himself?_ And she should not be disappointed. His pledge to her father was a Jephthah's oath, honorable only in the breaking. His mission, all his hours in Hunston, took changed shape before the eye of his whirling mind, monstrous, accusing, unbelievably base. Reward that trust with treachery, that faith with betrayal? Never while he lived. Out of his turmoil came peace and light, flooding the far reaches of his soul. In crises thought moves with the speed of light. The young man's mental revolution was over and done with in a second's time; the pause was infinitesimal. Almost as she finished her last remark, Mr. Carstairs's daughter turned from the rail and took a step forward upon the deck, as though to jog her host toward that promised tour of the yacht which had now flagged so long. "I thought you ought to know this," she was saying, apparently quite unaware of his descent into the psychological deeps, "though perhaps you will think it not worth repeating. But before we go on, do tell me --won't you?--is Mr. Higginson merely--_seeing things_--a sort of he-Cassandra, you know--or really do you think there is any danger?" "No!" answered Varney, so promptly as to give the air of having waited long for just that question. "There is no danger now, thank God!" A heavy step sounded near, approaching. Starting to speak, he broke off, turned and saw the sailing-master coming towards him. Over the intervening stretch of deck the two men looked at each other, the master nervously, Varney victoriously. It was one of those critical moments whose importance no one can gauge until after the time for guaging is past. However, as it fell out, it was the master who spoke first.