It was all blank to the naked eye, and Hardy searched in vain for that star whose rise might have proved the malignant star of death and dishonour to them both. Again the lovers shifted places. Julia held the wheel whilst Hardy directed the glass at the boat. He watched the minute manoeuvres. It was a little field of Lilliputians, but every figure was as clean cut in the lens as the pygmies to the downward gazing eyes of Gulliver. The two boats came and went behind and upon the summer swell of the sea, but not so as to baffle the marine vision. The naked mast rolled and the men showed plain. Thirst and famine were in their motions, and Hardy sighed and gasped as he watched. He saw the infuriate gesture that brought the bottle to the mouth, the impassioned posture as the cracked lips drained the pannikin. He witnessed avidity, coloured into horror by human need in the passage of the clenched biscuit or piece of meat to the mouth. It nearly broke his heart to leave them. If ever a man was inspired by the compassion, the instincts, and the loyalty of a sailor, it was Hardy. Yet he thanked God with all his heart that they had plenty, that the weather promised fair, that they had another and a good boat, and that in this highway of the sailing ship human help was certain if calamitous destiny were not first. Hardy's eyes were moist as the telescope slowly sank from his arm; for let them be Dagos, let them be Dutchmen, call those men by any name you will, they were shipwrecked sailors upon a lonely sea, and their appeal to the Red Flag of England would have been irresistible but for the helpless condition of the _York_. Julia saw emotion in her lover's face, and caressed him with her eyes as though she would soothe him with her love, and never did she honour him more, nor felt a fuller flow of dumb and inward gratitude to the Father of all for this lifelong gift of sympathy, help, and devotion. "We shall run them out of reach of the glass," said Hardy. "I can scarcely see them as it is," she answered. "What is their story?" he went on. "It will be told because they will be saved. Yonder is one of the teachings of the sea. You pass a piece of wreck; it is encrusted with the jewelry of the ocean; it is girdled by a silver belt of fish. To one man it is a piece of wreckage; to another man it is a memorial, lofty, sublime, and awful as a cathedral, of fire, of explosion, of the beam-ended fabric with lashed figures in the shrouds, sunk to the foam, and blackening it with emergence like the iron shape dangling at the finger of a gibbet upon a wintry moor that foams with snow." "Do all sailors talk in this language?" said Julia. "Any man who can make himself understood speaks well. I do not love irony." Julia smiled archly. "You do not love irony," she said. "Did you ever love another before you loved me?"