By four-thirty, the day after the downpour, we had all come on board the lovely Naiad, had "settled" into our cabins, and were on deck—the girls in white serge or linen, the men in flannels—ready for tea.
If it had arrived, and we had been looking into our tea cups instead of at the seascape, the whole of Roger Fane's and Shelagh's life might have been different—mine, too, perhaps! But as it was, Shelagh and Roger were leaning on the rail together, and her gaze was fixed upon the blue water, because somehow she couldn't meet Roger's just then. What he had said to her I don't know; but more to avoid giving an answer than because she was wildly interested, the girl exclaimed: "What can that dark thing be, drifting—and bobbing up and down in the waves? I suppose it couldn't be a dead shark?"
"Hardly in these waters," said Roger Fane. "Besides, a dead shark floats wrong side up, and his wrong side is white. This thing looks black."
In ordinary circumstances I wouldn't have broken in on a tête-à-tête, but others were extricating themselves from their deck chairs, so I thought there was no harm in my being the first.
"More like a coffin than a shark," I said, with my elbows beside Shelagh's on the rail.
At that the whole party hurled itself in our direction, and the nearer the Naiad brought us to the floating object, the more like a coffin it became to our eyes. At last it was so much like, that Roger decided to stop the yacht and examine the thing, which might even be an odd-shaped small boat, overturned. He went off, therefore, to speak with the captain, leaving us in quite a state of excitement.
Almost before we'd thought the order given, the Naiad slowed down, and came to rest like a great Lohengrin swan in the clear azure wavelets. A boat was quickly lowered, and we saw that Roger himself accompanied the two rowers.
A few moments before he had looked so happy, so at peace with the world, that the tragic shadow in his eyes had actually vanished. His whole expression and bearing had been different, and he had seemed years younger—almost boyish, in his dark, shy, reserved way. But as he went down in the boat, he was again the Roger Fane I had known and wondered about.
"If he's superstitious, this will seem a bad omen," I thought. "That is, if the thing does turn out to be a coffin."
None of us remembered the tea we'd been pining for, though a white-clad steward was hovering with trays of cakes, cream, and strawberries. We could do nothing but hang over the rail and watch the Naiad's boat. We saw it reach the Thing, in whose neighbourhood it paused with lifted oars, while a discussion went on between Roger and the rowers. Apparently they argued, with due respect, against the carrying out of some order or suggestion. He was not a man to be disobeyed, however. After a moment or two, the work of taking the black thing in tow was begun.