When the two young women came back again, clothed and glowing (we hear that the tiny cabin was electrically warmed), evening was on the sea. They drew off a little to watch their ship, a blotch of brown-green floating on deep green water under a sky of dissolving lemon fire. Terence Fitzgerald still rode in the bows, tall, rapt and motionless (except that a sigh would now and then escape him, with a sentence or two). For him such things as Ambrose notes, axes of reference and other matters of exact detail, were not of moment. He had a fair beard, and he was bard-like and communed with the lordly ones, riding in the bows of the boat. And presently, when the _Floating Leaf_ drifted across the disc of the sun, he lifted his hands up, and his brows furrowed in what Ambrose calls the pain of his vision. He spoke: “I saw a cloud of them like peach-blossoms blown over the sea.” “A cloud of what?” asked Sir Richard. “The beautiful people.” Sir Richard was tickled. “They went sunwards, with an ecstasy on their faces, and we are to follow them.” “Ecstasy’s all very well in these tricky waters, Terence, but I should prefer to see their navigation certificates.” Terence smiled. “Believe me or not, my scientific Richard, we are to find a heavenly country.” Lychnis gazed at him round-eyed and more or less believing. She was prepared to believe everything that sounded beautiful. “He’s in the dessert-plate, too,” she murmured. Sir Richard started the engine and they went back to the ship. Ambrose notes how swiftly she loomed up out of the twilight, and adds that as they went on board a fierce, foreign face scowled at them out of a port-hole. 3 Ambrose had passed but a few minutes in his cabin, arranging his impressions and making a few colour notes, when Lord Sombrewater’s man knocked with a message. “His lordship’s compliments, Mr. Herbert, and will you be good enough to step along to his lordship’s room?” Ambrose stepped along, and describes the two men whom he found before a decanter of sherry in the suffused light of the stateroom. There were bamboos and clouds painted on the delicate walls, so that they might have been sitting in the grove where the Sages held their sessions at home. Lord Sombrewater and George Sprot had each a cigar and a glass of sherry. The former always had a cigar and a glass of sherry at seven o’clock, and Sprot would have a cigar and a glass of sherry with anybody at any time of day. The two were in consultation, if that can be called a consultation where the one party is merely testing the reactions of the other party to his announcements. Ambrose was greeted affably, but with swiftness and decision. “Come in, Ambrose. Sit down.” And Ambrose was in a chair. “A council to-morrow morning.” And Ambrose had made a note on his tablet. “A glass of sherry.” And the golden liquid was poured out. But Ambrose did not touch it.