"Clew up the mainsail," continued the captain, "and haul in the sails to the mainmast!" The ship stopped, or very nearly so. The pilot was already in his boat. I went up to the poor exile; tears were silently streaming down her cheeks. "You will be sure and fulfil my commission, will you not, monsieur?" she said in a broken voice. I bowed my acquiescence. "You will embrace my mother for me?" "I promise you I will do so, madame." "But," said the husband, "if you want monsieur to kiss your mother for you, you ought first to give him the kiss." "Oh yes, certainly!" exclaimed the young wife effusively; "with all my heart." And she flung her arms round my neck. Here was an unusual situation! That woman and I had never seen one another till the night before, and in the morning we were still strangers to one another; at starting we were merely acquaintances; by luncheon we had developed into friends; parting made us seem like brother and sister. Oh! mysteries of the heart, misunderstood by the crowd at large, but which turn those to whom God has revealed His secrets into beings destined for suffering. I had greater difficulty in leaving these friends of a day than it would have given me pleasure to see friends of twenty years' standing. "You will not forget my name, will you, monsieur?" the young wife said. "Try and read the next books that I shall write, madame, and I promise you you shall find that name in one of my very first novels." There was also, perhaps, underlying the attraction for the ship, my anxiety at the prospect of the more or less perilous descent to which I was about to subject myself. Luckily, I had plenty of spectators to witness my gymnastic manœuvres, and you know how the feeling of being looked at redoubles one's courage. So I went bravely forward towards the ship's side; I caught hold of the main shrouds as well as the ladder, which the pilot, afraid, perhaps, of my falling into the sea before I had paid him his crown, had, to make my descent easier, held taut with one hand, while with his other, by help of a rope fastened through a port-hole, he kept the skiff within reach of the ship. I had not descended two rungs of the ladder before the wind blew my hat off. I did not even try to catch it, for I more than needed both hands to clutch fast hold of the ladder. At last, to my great satisfaction, and without displaying too much clumsiness, I reached the bottom of the skiff. That was one of the happiest moments of my life. I was scarcely seated on one of the seats in the boat before the pilot let go both ladder and rope, and we were thirty feet away from _la Pauline._ I could soon hear the captain's voice shouting-- "Let go the main-sails!"