The boat’s crew laid to their oars with a hearty will, directly I gave them the word; and we shot over the still waters almost with the speed of a steamer’s launch. It was a new experience for me to find myself afloat upon the Atlantic in a small boat, and I confess, even in such fair weather, not wholly a pleasant one. The long rollers, alternately lifting us to prodigious heights and plunging us as to a very abyss of the ocean, shut in turn both ships from my view and permitted me but a rare glimpse of them as we rose upon the crest of some rolling wave which seemed about to engulf us utterly. I realised, as all seamen realise from time to time, the meaning of man’s victory over the sea and the splendour of it. And excitement carried me without distress where I would have feared to go upon a common day. I was about to see my little Joan again. Unless this man had lied to me, so much must be beyond question. I should find her on the great ship and take her, at last and finally, from this hive of ruffians into which the accidents of life had cast her from her very childhood. Much as she had suffered, it remained my hope that her own courage and the circumstances of her presence upon the ship had saved her from that nameless evil which might otherwise have been her fate. Imroth had kept the child from harm—that I firmly believed; and Imroth having fled, the terror of his name might still be powerful to save her. Herein lay the supreme consolation as our voyage drew to its end, and every rolling crest showed us more clearly the immense hull, standing up from the water like a very Castle Impregnable. I was the bearer of a message to Joan Fordibras, and she should be the first there to whom the story of succour must be told. There could be no purpose dearer to me or one I embarked upon so gladly. The sun had been upon the point of setting when I quitted the yacht, and a chill of evening fell with an aftermath of drifting mist as the men drove the long-boat up to the ship. My first impression, for I had never before viewed a big steamer from a small boat on the open sea, was one of a vast towering immensity rising sheer above me as the wall of a fortress or the black precipice of a mountain. The ladder itself, by which I must gain the deck, swung fragile as a thread from a boom amidships—no steam came from the ship’s valves, although the bilge was flowing freely. I could detect no sound of movement or human activity; nothing but the appearance of three or four pale anxious faces at the gangway above allowed me to say that the ship had a crew at all. These men, however, waited for my coming with an expectancy which was almost pathetic, and scarcely had I climbed the ladder than they surrounded me immediately with such piteous entreaty to come to their comrades’ aid that my own imperious question sounded abrupt almost to the point of harshness. “You have a lady upon this ship—where is she?” “She has gone, sir.”