She looked a little fearfully at Applebo. He was smiling at her with the air of one about to say a conventional farewell ... or about to try to do so. Hermione thought of his loneliness ... the Finn was still ashore ... and the tears rose to her eyes. She lingered, and from afar the _Shark's_ bell chided her. "Good-bye..." said Hermione, tremulously, and held out her hand. Applebo took it, raised it in his, and brushed it with his lips. "Good-bye," he answered, almost brusquely. Still Hermione did not go. Perhaps it may have occurred to her that inasmuch as she had been trying to go, without success, for the last half-hour, an additional half-minute would not particularly matter. This is feminine reasoning, and as sound as any such, and Hermione was exceedingly feminine. Perhaps, also, there flashed across her memory the recollection of another farewell, and of something which had happened, partly under water. At any rate, she lingered. This was very wrong of Hermione, and if she had had a mother, poor girl, instead of an elderly Norwegian sailorman impotently banging a bell, it never could have happened. But she lingered. Some instinct advised her that there was still something to be told; that she had not heard the entire tale, and that there would be a singular incompletion to the whole affair until she was told it. In which she was quite correct. Long-lost parents have an undoubted value, but it dwindles shockingly before that of new-found loves. "Good-bye..." said Hermione, invitingly, and held out her hand. Applebo had honestly meant to put her back in her boat and give her a shove in the direction of the patient bell. But there are limits to all human self-control, and Hermione at that moment stood outside them. There was a sad little droop to her shoulders, and to the corners of her pretty mouth, and the roses in her cheeks and violets in her eyes were blazing through the fog like flowers in a neglected garden. In that moment Hermione's sweetness was certainly not intended to expend itself on several cubic fathoms of fog, and, if Applebo permitted this, he would have been a fool and not worth the trouble of telling about. He had been thinking not of himself, but of Hermione, and, when he saw that Hermione was not quite content, he forgot that she was a very young girl, and he a wise and world-worn man of twenty-five, of whom the motto should have been--_memento mori_. Wherefore, he said: