"Aren't we dreadfully near?" she asked.
Wyllard did not answer. He was gazing up at the bridge, and once more the whistle hurled out a great warning blast. It hardly seemed to her that the two vessels could pass clear of each other. Then Wyllard laid a hand upon her shoulder.
"The skipper's starboarding. We'll go round her stern," he said.
His grasp was reassuring, and she watched the straining curves of canvas and line of half-submerged hull. It rose with streaming bows, swung high above the sea, sank again, and vanished with bewildering suddenness into a belt of driving fog. She was not sure that there had been any peril, but it was certainly over now, and she was rather puzzled by her sensations when Wyllard had held her shoulder. For one thing, she had felt instinctively that she was safe with him. She, however, decided not to trouble herself about the reason for this, and by and bye she looked up at him. The expression she had already noticed was once more in his face.
"I don't think you like the fog any more than I do," she said.
"No," said Wyllard, with a quiet forcefulness that almost startled her. "I hate it."
"Why do you go as far as that?"
"It recalls something that still gives me a very bad few minutes every now and then. It has been worrying me again to-night."
"I wonder," said Agatha simply, "if you would care to tell me?"
The man looked down on her with a little wry smile. "I haven't told it often, but you shall hear," he said. "It's a tale of a black failure." He stretched out a hand and pointed to the sliding fog and ranks of tumbling seas. "It was very much this kind of night, and we were lying, reefed down, off one of the Russians' beaches, when I asked for volunteers. I got them—two boats' crews of the finest seamen that ever handled oar or sealing rifle."