It was not long before the brig that was chasing on the schooner's weather-quarter swelled and paled in distortion with the encompassing thickness, and presently she was a pallid square, and then she became a smudge, after which the rain curtain dropped upon her, and she vanished. Then it was that Captain Weaver luffed the schooner to windward of her course, and she went ahead with flattened-in sheets, leaning to it and severing the flint-coloured billow with her sharp tooth of fore-foot: and so she held on, until, had the weather cleared, the brig, even had she taken in her stun-sails and hauled the wind with yards sweated fore and aft, would have been found dead to leeward and far away beyond all dream of prize money amongst the French crew. "I can't conceive of anything," said Captain Weaver, smiling with something of pride at the Admiral and Captain Acton, "born--I don't care in what shipwright's yard, whether British or French or Roosian or Spaniard--as is going to have more than a look at the _Aurora_ when it's her pleasure to show nothing but her heels." Nevertheless it was an adventure fraught with danger to the schooner, and neither the Admiral nor Captain Acton needed to be informed that had the weather been a little thicker and the brig a knot or two faster so that she could have brought the schooner within range of her broad-side, it was odds if the fall of a mast or the ruin of a sail had not resulted in the _Aurora's_ company finding a lodging in the brig or under hatches in their own little ship and sailing for the nearest French port, with the pursuit of the _Minorca_ immediately ended. But the essential object of Captain Weaver and the very first desire of Captain Acton and the Admiral was the overtaking of the _Minorca_, her capture, and the rescue of Lucy. To this end it was extremely necessary that they should speak ships to ascertain if the barque whose rig would make her remarkable had been sighted or spoken, and if so when and where? They had fallen in with two or three vessels which after very careful inspection they had considered safe to speak. But they could obtain no information. Nothing answering to a ship rigged as the _Minorca_ was had been sighted. So Captain Weaver stuck as best he could to his course for Rio, though much hindered by opposing winds. It was to be hoped if the _Aurora_ lay fair in the wake of the _Minorca_ that the winds which had delayed the schooner had also baffled the barque. Now, as we have seen, the 4th day of June had come, and the _Aurora_, with a light air aloft which put a gentle breathing into her gaff top-sails and lighter canvas, was slowly scoring her way through the heart of a wide circle of Atlantic ocean, along which the swell ran gently, whilst the surface at a distance resembled a motionless sheet of ice under a blue sky.