It was so near the dinner hour that it had been decided to postpone dinner till the mails and passengers bound for Queenstown had left. The tender was close in sight, rolling and pitching in a manner that seemed inscrutable to the throng leaning over the taffrail. The magnificent _Danic_ stood immovable as a stone pier on the rolling tide. The tender was speedily freighted with innumerable bags containing the mails, some thirty passengers followed amid hearty farewells from newly-made friends left behind, and many appointments were registered to meet again in London or Paris. With the last group there stepped toward the gangway a tall figure, a woman closely veiled, carrying a small bag in her hand. Just as she was stepping on the gangway the tender gave a lurch that dislodged the railed plank. Two passengers already on it narrowly escaped the disaster. They had just managed to skip on to the paddle-box of the tender, when, amid loud cries of “Stand back,” addressed to the group pressing forward on to the _Danic_, half a dozen ready hands hauled the gangway out of its aslant position, and made things smooth again. Once more the tall veiled figure pressed forward, when one of the steerage passengers roughly gripped her by the shoulder and thrust her back. “Not this journey, madame,” he said, seizing her wrist with a grip of iron. “Your passage is booked all the way to Liverpool, and we may as well make the most of the journey.” The woman turned on her captor with the fury of a trapped lioness. For a moment it seemed as if she would grapple with him, and since she was nearly his height it would have been a desperate conflict, probably ending with a death grip under water. For a moment the idea flashed over the mind of Mme. de Vigny. She felt her game was up; wearied with the squalor of her unused condition, she did not care how soon she handed in the checks. But she remembered that she had still one card to play, over which she had brooded in the dead, unhappy night as she lay wide awake in her narrow berth. “Perhaps you’d better have let me go,” she said to the man, whose plain clothes disguised his vocation of police sergeant. Then she sauntered slowly back, conscious that among the crowd on the hurricane deck curiously watching this episode was the man she really began to love with desperate affection now that her charms no longer lured him, and he was restlessly counting every mile that separated him from the white-curtained, rose-garlanded cottage in Guernsey where his wife awaited his coming.