"Sail, ho!" shouted Ben Plank, who, with some others, was up aloft taking advantage of this bright blink, to get the spare mizzen-topmast shipped, with all its hamper and gearing.
"Where away, Ben?" asked Morley, snatching Tom's telescope from its brass hooks under the companion-hatch.
"There, sir, in that streak of light to windward."
Looming large as coming out of the haze, Morley saw a large, square-rigged vessel, with all her fore-and-aft canvas set, running close-hauled on a different current of wind, which did not as yet affect the Princess, and which would probably carry her ahead.
Her canvas was white as snow, and shone like the outspread wings of a swan in the bright gleam of sunshine, and in strong relief against the gray and dusky sky beyond.
She was visible but for a few minutes—so briefly, indeed, that Morrison had not time to run the ensign up to the gaff-peak, when she seemed to dart into the gray obscurity ahead, and to vanish like a phantom that melted into the sky; but though invisible, it was evident that the Princess, a faster sailer, would soon leave her far astern.
In that large square-rigged ship, that spanked along on a taut bowline, with the white foam curling under her black bows, and flying over her gilded catheads, how little Morley Ashton imagined that Ethel Basset—the Ethel of his hopes by day and dreams by night, the centre around which all his aspirations and his life itself revolved—was seated side by side with Hawkshaw on one of the quarter-deck seats, watching, through a fifteen-mile lorgnette, or racing-glass, the outline of the Princess, whose canvas being all in shadow came blackly out, for a few minutes, from the sombre atmosphere to leeward, and then melted from their view for ever.
CHAPTER IX.
THE STORM.
Varied by occasional torrents of rain, black, cloudy, and squally skies, the regular "Cape weather" continued after this, and the Princess was soon running under close-reefed topsails. So frequently were the reefs taken in and shaken out, that Bill Morrison said they reminded him of an old Scottish seaman's rhyme: