Hardy paused to listen and peer. There was nothing to see, but he might have heard a sound of weeping all about, as though old ocean was mourning over its blindness. He then went to bed, but not to sleep right away. The Frenchman's insolent touching of his brow had accentuated his own deep suspicion of the captain's sanity, and very grave, though perplexed, reflection attended his thoughts of Layard, and the tragically perilous situation of the ship in charge of a lunatic so subtly mad that no one but his chief officer might have understanding enough to see how it was with him. At eight bells in the middle watch he was aroused by Mr. Candy, and was on deck in a minute or two, for he was a smart man all around; the first at the yard-arm in reefing when his duties had carried him there, the first to spring to the cry, no matter the command, swift in relief, and for ever on the alert whilst the responsibility of life, cargo, and fabric was his. The fog was still very thick, but a thin wind had sprung up out of the east, and the streaming of the waters was like the shaling of a summer tide upon shingle. The braces had been manned when this weak air came, and the yards swung to hold the maintopsail aback; the ship rolled gently under the arrest of her canvas, and there was nothing to see and nothing to do but let the fog soak into the spirits. "A spare bunk in the forecastle has been found for the French mate," Candy had said. The fellow had grumbled, muttered that he had been an officer on board his own vessel, and deserved better usage. Candy said he was lucky to save his life, and to find a bed in a British forecastle. The Frenchman growled that he considered himself important enough to sleep in the cabin. "What did you say to that?" Hardy had asked. "I said, 'You be damned!'" Candy replied. Not until five bells, half-past six, in Hardy's watch did the fog show signs of breaking up. It thinned in places, and presently through the stretching ceiling of it the cold, pale dawn looked down upon the sea, and made it piebald with granite-coloured spaces. The breeze then freshened and the fog began to fly. Columns of it moved away stately like pillars of sand on the desert; it swept in Titan cobwebs between the masts; it sped like silken veils streaming from viewless fleeting spirits over the trucks. Wide vistas opened to windward; large blue eyes, soft with the moistness of their light, floated upon the trembling eastern brine. The sun darted a pale yellow lance, and as the captain put his head through the companion-hatch the scene of deep, saving a blankness in the west, opened around, and it was a shining morning with a bright sun and a blue sea and an azure sky and a pleasant breeze of wind. Scarcely had the captain's head shown when Hardy, looking seawards over the quarter, exclaimed: "There's the barque that fouled us last night, sir. She's got a wift at her mizzen-peak."