I will not say that there is more of melancholy in the slow creeping of darkness over the sea than in the first pale streaking of the dawn, but the shining out of the stars one by one, the stretching of the great plain of the deep into a midnight surface, whether snow-covered with tossing surges or smooth as black marble and placid as the dark velvet sky that bends to the liquid confines, has a mystic character which, even if the dawn held it, would be weak as an impression through the quick dispelling of it by the joyous sun, but which is accentuated in the twilight shadows by their gradual darkening into the blackness of night. I particularly felt the oncoming of the dusk this evening. The glory of the sunset had been great, the twilight brief. Even as the gold and orange faded in the west so did the canvas of our ship steal out spectrally into the grey gloom of the north and east; the water washed past wan as the light of the horny paring of moon; the figures of the four men to windward were changed into dusky, staring statues, and the wake sloped out from the starboard quarter full of eddying sparkles as green as emeralds. The canvas of the schooner, that had shone to the sunset with the glare of yellow satin, faded into a pallid cloud that often bothered the sight with its resemblance to the large puffs of vapour blowing into the east. "I should be glad to know her intentions," said I, uneasily. "If she be a piratical craft it will not do for you to be seen by her people, Imogene. Is it curiosity only that brings them racing up to us? May be--may be! They will be having good glasses aboard and have been excited by our extraordinary rig." "Why should I not be seen, Geoffrey?" asked my innocent girl. "Because, dearest, they may fall in love with and carry you off." "But if they should take us both?" said she, planting her little hand under my arm. "Ay, but one would first like to know their calling," I replied, straining my eyes at the vessel that, at the pace she was tearing through it, would be on our quarter within hailing distance in twenty minutes. What did Vanderdecken mean to do? He made no sign. Fear and passion enough had been raised in him by the Centaur's pursuit; was I to suppose that yonder schooner had failed to alarm him because he was puzzled by her rig and by the substitution of the tricolour for the royal _fleur de lys_? "Speak to him, Imogene," said I, "that I may follow. They may resent any hints from me if I break in upon them on a sudden. "Captain," she called in her gentle voice, "is not that vessel chasing us?" He rounded gravely upon her: "She is apparently desirous of speaking with us, my child. She will be hailing us shortly." "But if she be a pirate, captain?" "Doth Herr Fenton still think her so?" he demanded.