My feelings for Rimânez too began at this time to undergo a curious change. The fascination I had for him, the power he exercised over me remained as great as ever, but I found myself often absorbed in a close study of him, strangely against my own will. Sometimes his every look seemed fraught with meaning,--his every gesture suggestive of an almost terrific authority. He was always to me the most attractive of beings,--nevertheless there was an uneasy sensation of doubt and fear growing up in my mind regarding him,--a painful anxiety to know more about him than he had ever told me,--and on rare occasions I experienced a sudden shock of inexplicable repulsion against him which like a tremendous wave threw me back with violence upon myself and left me half-stunned with a dread of I knew not what. Alone with him, as it were, on the wide sea, cut off for a time from all other intercourse than that which we shared together, these sensations were very strong upon me. I began to note many things which I had been too blind or too absorbed in my own pursuits to observe before; the offensive presence of Amiel, who acted as chief steward on board the yacht, filled me now not only with dislike, but nervous apprehension,--the dark and more or less repulsive visages of the crew haunted me in my dreams;--and one day, leaning over the vessel's edge and gazing blankly down into the fathomless water below, I fell to thinking of strange sorceries of the East, and stories of magicians who by the exercise of unlawful science did so make victims of men and delude them that their wills were entirely perverted and no longer their own. I do not know why this passing thought should have suddenly overwhelmed me with deep depression,--but when I looked up, to me the sky had grown dark, and the face of one of the sailors who was near me polishing the brass hand-rail, seemed singularly threatening and sinister. I moved to go to the other side of the deck, when a hand was gently laid on my shoulder from behind, and turning, I met the sad and splendid eyes of Lucio. "Are you growing weary of the voyage Geoffrey?" he asked--"Weary of those two suggestions of eternity--the interminable sky, the interminable sea? I am afraid you are!--man easily gets fatigued with his own littleness and powerlessness when he is set afloat on a plank between air and ocean. Yet we are travelling as swiftly as electricity will bear us,--and, as worked in this vessel, it is carrying us at a far greater speed than you perhaps realize or imagine." I made no immediate answer, but taking his arm strolled slowly up and down. I felt he was looking at me, but I avoided meeting his gaze. "You have been thinking of your wife?" he queried softly and, as I thought, sympathetically--"I have shunned,--for reasons you know of,--all allusion to the tragic end of so beautiful a creature. Beauty is, alas!--so often subject to hysteria! Yet--if you had any faith, you would believe she is an angel now!"