The young man looked helplessly at her. He had not the slightest idea of her meaning, did not, in fact, know the difference between a foresheet and a mainsail. And it was just to find out the depth of his ignorance that she had spoken.
“Never mind,” she said, “I’ll do it myself.”
She made the rope fast and took hold of the tiller again. The sails shook, and filled softly as they glided out from under the wall. The soft breeze blew straight behind them, the tide was just beginning to ebb. She slackened the mainsheet a little, and the water hissed as they spun down under the gray town towards the harbor’s mouth.
A dozen vessels lay at anchor below the town quay, their lamps showing a strange orange-yellow in the moonlight; between them the minister saw the cottages of Ruan glimmering on the eastern shore, and above them the coastguard station, with its flagstaff, a clear white upon the black hillside. It seemed to him that they were not shaping their course for the little town.
“I thought you told me,” he said at length, “that Mrs.—the dying woman—lived across there.”
The girl shook her head. “Not in Ruan itsel’—Ruan parish. We’ll have to go round the point.”
She was leaning back and gazing straight before her, towards the harbor’s mouth. The boat was one of the class that serves along that coast for hook and line as well as drift-net fishing, clinker built, about twenty-seven feet in the keel and nine in the beam. It had no deck beyond a small cuddy forward, on top of which a light hoarfrost was gathering as they moved. The minister stood beside the girl, and withdrew his eyes from this cuddy roof to contemplate her.
“Do you mean to say,” he asked, “that you don’t take cold wearing no wrap or bonnet on frosty nights like this?”
She let the tiller go for a moment, took his hand by the wrist and laid it on her own bare arm. He felt the flesh, but it was firm and warm. Then he withdrew his hand hastily, without finding anything to say. His eyes avoided hers. When, after half a minute, he looked at her again, her gaze was fixed straight ahead upon the misty stretch of sea beyond the harbor’s mouth.
In a minute or two they were sweeping between the tall cliff and the reef of rocks that guard this entrance on either side. On the reef stood a wooden cross, painted white, warning vessels to give it a wide berth; on the cliff a gray castle, with a battery before it, under the guns of which they spun seaward, still with the wind astern.