"Where away?" shouted Hardy from the quarter-deck. "Right ahead, sir," answered the man, who looked a toy sailor, his white breeches trembling, and the round of his back sharp-lined against the blue. Hardy fetched the glass, and going to the mizzen-rigging pointed it. He caught it instantly. It was a boat, how far off it was impossible to say, for distance, when a small object grows visible, is very difficult to measure with the eye at sea, but she was plain to the naked sight of the man on the yard-arm; the telescope brought her close, and Hardy counted five figures in her, one of whom was standing on the foremost thwart waving something,--a shirt or a piece of canvas. Her mast was stepped, but the sail was down, and she lay waiting, vanishing and reappearing as the shallow hollows ran sucking under her. When Hardy dropped the glass he found the captain by his side. "What is in sight?" he exclaimed, speaking with something of breathlessness, as though his heart was tightened. "A ship's boat, sir, with five people in her," answered Hardy. "I shall find him," exclaimed the captain, and the old look of superiority to all human intelligence, and the pathetic sparkle of cunning with which the diseased brain will often illuminate the eye, were perceptible to Hardy. "Give me the glass, sir." The captain levelled it and was a long time in looking, and all the time he looked he breathed slow and deep like a man in heavy slumber. "Stand by to back the foretopsail," he exclaimed. "Let a hand be ready with a line and others to help them aboard, for twice I have fallen in with people so weakened by distress and famine and thirst--O God, that awful part of it--that we have lifted them like babies over the side." Presently the boat was close under the bow; the foretopsail was aback, and the ship, heaving slowly without way, was alongside the little fabric. Her people were four men and a woman. The men were seamen, apparelled in such clothes as the merchant sailor went clad in. They staggered a little as they stood up, and one in the bow reeled as he caught the end of the line. The woman was sitting in the stern-sheets. She wore a straw hat, the shadow of whose brim darkened her face as a veil might. She was clothed in a black jacket, and the material of her dress was dark. Her head was a little sunk, as though she was too weary to hold it erect. The captain, overlaying the rail, stared with bright devouring eyes into the boat. He did not seem to heed the people in her; he was looking for something else. "Are you able to help the lady aboard?" shouted Hardy. "No, sir," answered the man who had caught the line; "we've been adrift two days." His weak voice proclaimed the truth of his words. At the sound of Hardy's cry the woman in the stern-sheets lifted her head, and the shadow of the brim of her hat slipped off her face. Hardy instantly recognised her. "Great God!" he exclaimed.