With her slight figure relieved against the skyline, she waited for him to complete his preparations. Now and then her eyes travelled, with unerring directness, to the mound of sand where he had that morning buried the letter. What did those hard-packed grains of sand conceal? Instinctively she played with the question and its import sat deep in her eye. As if by a stroke of art, she had placed herself in direct line with the figure-head, so that no one glancing that way could fail to be struck by the dissimilarity between image and maid. Mobility and an ardent capacity for a rich and varied existence were written all over her; that something which is the potency of womanhood itself seemed to have awakened suddenly from the torpor of youth in that little heart and to have come abroad for the first time experimentally. There she sat, and whenever he turned his head, he was struck anew with her, so that he must needs look again and yet again. She had covered her feet with her skirts and her hands were clasped decorously in her lap. Her brow had a male gravity, as distinguished from her chin which was softly-turned and exceeding feminine. Her hair was parted and trained in two shining unbroken portions and tucked away behind her ears, something as a curtain is looped back from a window. The sphinx-like mystery of Leonardo's _La Gioconda_ was alive in her eyes. Even while the girl, in her essential self, remained superlatively innocent and unconscious, there looked out from her little virgin countenance at Emil, gravely selecting him, the 'Genius of the Species.' Her glance proclaimed sex and intellectual detachment. Presently Emil turned his face over his shoulder and beckoned to her; and his laugh was repeated by the water coursing up the beach and curling round the boat in white-lipped waves. The fog had disappeared and the sun was now shining joyously. Rachel grasped the oars, rowing with long even strokes, and Emil sat in the bow. To one side of the boat and projecting into the water, he had attached a bell, which gave out when struck a special, sharp, short note; and on the other side of the boat he had placed a telephone receiver connected with a small box. "And inside that box is another still smaller of metal," he told her, "and that contains the secret of the whole device. Did you ever hear of the microphone?" She shook her head.