Uncle John's telling of the story had never given Ben much realizing sense of the smothering terror of fog at sea. He had it now, in the delicate presence of the _Hera's_ image. Wet smoke pressing on the eyeballs of men seeking to live; no guide, no refuge, no gleam of direction anywhere, only merciless whiteness concealing fangs. A whiteness like snow, a silence like the silence of snow that muffles footsteps in a winter night. No wind: fog flows in where the wind is not. Under the fog, no weakening of the rolling invisible currents that could drag man's creation into the snag teeth of a reef or against the crushing mass of a dead hulk. "_Stove in her la'board side, filled in twenty minutes...._" Fog.... They would have prayed, the men of the _Hera_, and perhaps Captain Jenks with them if he had time for it. When they came safe ashore, not a man lost--but first the long blind groping, in one boat and one damned little dory, never knowing what might answer the next weary thrust of the oars--why, safe ashore they would have praised God for hearing them--the same God who strangely failed to hear a myriad others praying in extremity--and with some leftover gratitude to Peter Jenks as God's instrument. "_Ben, hear me. I say God is far away, no whit concerned with man...._" "Sir, will you not look up?" There was a trace of most gentle laughter in that. Ben wondered when she had come in her silence, how long she had been standing there with the brandy glass on a little tray. "Oh, I'm sorry. I was far off indeed." "I know." "Thank you--this is very kind.... You are from one of the French islands, are you not?" "Guadeloupe." A sip of the brandy warmed him a little. It was old, and smooth, the glass fantastically lovely--probably the best in the house, and probably English or continental, since nothing of the kind was made in the colonies; Uncle John's house had nothing to match it. "This must seem a cold foreign place to you." "Oh, I have been more than eight years in Boston, sir. It used to be, I must think in French and translate before I spoke--I do not do that now. Perhaps I do not look as old as I am." "I had thought you was near my age."