Wyllard laid a hand upon Agatha’s shoulder.
“The skipper’s starboarding. We’ll go around to the stern,” he said.
His grasp was reassuring, and Agatha watched the straining curves of canvas and the line of half-submerged hull. The brig rose with streaming bows, swung high above the sea, sank again, and vanished with bewildering suddenness into a belt of driving fog.
Agatha was not sure that there had been any peril, but it was certainly past 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 decided not to trouble herself about the reason for this, and presently she looked up at him. The expression that she had noticed now and then was once more in his face.
“I don’t think you like the fog any more than I do,” she said.
“No,” responded Wyllard, with a quiet forcefulness that startled her. “I hate it.”
“Why?”
“It recalls something that still gives me a very bad few minutes every once in a while. 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. “I haven’t told it often, but you shall hear,” he replied. “It’s a tale of a black failure.” He stretched out a hand and pointed to the 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.”