"He's going out, Muriel. You will thank him—I don't seem able to," she said.
Muriel came forward with outstretched hands, and in another moment Austin, to his visible embarrassment, felt her warm grasp.
"Oh," she said, "Mrs. Hatherly knew you meant to. I feel quite sure I can trust you to bring him back to me."
Austin managed to disengage his hands, and smiled a little, though it was Jacinta he looked at.
"I think," he said, "I have a sufficient inducement for doing what I can. Still, you will excuse me. There are one or two points I want to talk over with Captain Farquhar."
He turned away, and twenty minutes later Jacinta, standing on the bridge-deck, alone, watched his boat slide away into the blaze of moonlight that stretched suggestively towards Africa.
CHAPTER X
JACINTA IS NOT CONTENT
Darkness was closing down on the faintly shining sea, and the dull murmur of the surf grew louder as the trade-breeze died away, when Jacinta and Muriel Gascoyne sat in the stern of a white gig which two barefooted Canarios pulled across Las Palmas harbour on the evening on which Austin was to sail. In front of them the spray still tossed in filmy clouds about the head of the long, dusky mole, and the lonely Isleta hill cut black as ebony against a cold green transparency, while skeins of lights twinkled into brilliancy round the sweep of bay. Jacinta, however, saw nothing of this. She was watching the Estremedura's dark hull rise higher above the line of mole, and listening to one of the boatmen who accompanied the rhythmic splash of oars with a little melodious song. She long afterwards remembered its plaintive cadence and the words of it well.
"Las aves marinas vuelen encima la mar," he sang, and then while the measured thud and splash grew a trifle faster, "No pueden escapar las penas del amor."