He stood near her, but did not watch her or touch her. Instead he broke the loaf of bread into portions and kept a lookout north and south and east and west. No human being came into range of vision. The slow minutes went by, then came Joan’s voice, broken yet, but steadying with every word. “All that is over now—I’ll not do that again.” She came up to him and took a piece of the bread. “Let us go on. We can eat it as we go.” They walked on. “It was Gervaise and Lantern,” said Aderhold, “who told her that tale of a capture at the mill. They are ahead.... I have seen brave men and women, but I have seen none braver than you, Joan.... Life is very great. There are in it threads of all colours and every tone that is, and if happiness is not stable, neither is misery. You are brave—be brave enough to be happy!” The sun declined, the town ahead grew larger against a soft and vivid sky. Now they could see the harbour and that there were ships at anchor. They now met, overtook, or were passed by people. Some spoke, some went on preoccupied, but none stopped and questioned them. They entered the town by a travelled way, slipping in with a crowd of carts and hucksters. Within, and standing for a moment looking back, they saw coming with dust and jingling the party that had passed them lying in the pit. They turned, struck into a narrow way that led downward to the sea, and came upon the waterside in the red sunset light. A fishwife crossed their path. “The Moon Tavern? Yonder, beyond the nets.” They came to it in the dusk, its sign a great, full moon with a man, a dog, and a thornbush on the golden ground. As it loomed before them, Gervaise stepped from the shadow of a heap of timber. “Greeting, Giles and John! George Dragon and I have been here this hour.—And yonder lies the Silver Queen.” CHAPTER XXV THE SILVER QUEEN THE SILVER QUEEN, a ship neither great nor small, high-pooped, white-sailed, her figurehead a crowned woman, her name good for seaworthiness, ploughed the green water. Her sailors and the adventurers for new lands whom she carried watched their own island sink from view, watched the European coast, saw it also fade, saw only the boundless, restless main. The ship drove south, for the Indies’ passage.