The time passed; at the hour of eleven, or thereabouts the hull of the ship astern was visible upon the water-line. The breeze had freshened, and the long heave of the swell left by the gale was whipped into wrinkles, which melted into a creamy sparkling as they ran. Under the sun, upon our starboard bow, the ocean was kindled into glory; through the trembling splendour the blue of the sea surged up in fluctuating veins, and the conflict of the sapphire dye welling up into the liquid dazzle, where it showed an instant, ere being overwhelmed by the blaze on the water, was a spectacle of beauty worthy of life-long remembrance. Elsewhere, the crisped plain of the ocean stretched darker than the Heavens, under which were many clouds, moving with full white bosoms like the sails of ships, carrying tinted shinings resembling wind-galls, or fragments of solar rainbows, upon their shoulders or skirts, as they happened to offer them to the sun. By this time you felt the stirring of curiosity throughout the ship. Whatever jobs the crew had been put to they now neglected, that they might hang over the sides or stand upon the rail to watch and study the ship astern of us. Many had an avidity in their stare that could not have been matched by the looks of famine-stricken creatures. Whether they were visited by some dim sense or perception of their frightful lot and yearned, out of this weak emotion, for the ship in pursuit, albeit they might not have been able to make their wishes intelligible to their own understandings, God knoweth. 'Twas moving to see them; one with the sharp of his hand to his forehead, another fixedly gazing out of a tangle of grey hair, a third showing fat and ghastly to the sunlight, a fourth with black eyes charged with the slate-coloured patches of blindness, straining his imperfect gaze under a bald brow, corrugated into lines as hard as iron. Vanderdecken had left Imogene and stood on the weather quarter with the mate. The girl being alone, I walked aft to her and said in English, feigning to speak of the weather by looking aloft as I spoke, "I have held aloof long enough, I think. He will not object if I join you now?" "No--his head is full of that ship yonder," she replied. "For my part I am as weary of sitting as you must be of standing. Let us walk a little. He has never yet objected to our conversing. Why should he do so now?" So saying she rose. Her sheer weariness of being alone, or of talking to Vanderdecken, was too much for her policy of caution. We fell to quietly pacing the poop deck to leeward, and with a most keen and exquisite delight I could taste in her manner the gladness our being together filled her with, and foresee the spirit of defiance to danger and risks that would grow in her with the growth of our love.