"My sailors! Grace, shall I take you back whilst there is yet time?"
She flashed a look at me over her finger tips.
"Certainly not!" she exclaimed with emphasis, then hid her face again.
I seated myself by her side, but it took me five minutes to get her to look at me, and another five minutes to coax a smile from her. In this while the men were busy about the decks. I heard Caudel's growling lungs of leather delivering orders in a half-stifled hurricane note, but I did not know that we were under way until I put my head through the companion hatch, and saw the dusky fabrics of the piers on either side stealing almost insensibly past us. Now that the wide expanse of sky had opened over the land, I could witness a dimness, as of the shadowing of clouds, in the quarter of the sky against which stood the unfinished block of the cathedral. This caused me to reckon upon the wind freshening presently. As it now blew it was a very light air indeed, scarce with weight enough to steady the light cloths of the yacht. There was an unwieldy lump of a French smack slowly grinding her way up the harbour close in against the pier on the port side, and astern of us were the triangular lights of a paddle-wheeled steamer, bound to London, timed for the tide that was now high, and filling the quietude of the night with the noise of the swift beats of revolving wheels.
"Mind that steamer!" I called out to Caudel, who was at the helm.
She passed us close, noisily shearing through it, with the white water at her stem throbbing like clouds of steam to the paddles, whence the race aft spread far into the gloom astern in a wide wake of yeast; a body of fire broke from her tall chimney and illuminated the long, thick line of smoke like the play of lightning upon the face of a thunder-cloud; her saloon was aglow, and the illuminated portholes went winking past upon the vision as though there lay a coil of flame along the length of the ebony black sides. She swept past and was away, leaving behind her a swell upon which the Spitfire tumbled about so violently that I came very near to being thrown out of the hatch in which I was standing. The commotion presently ceased, and by this time we were abreast of the longer of the two pier-heads, clear of the harbour, but I waited still a moment or so to take another view of the night and to send a glance round. Undoubtedly the stars shining low down over the old town of Boulogne had dimmed greatly within the hour, though they still flashed with brilliance in the direction of the English coast. The surf rolling upon the sand on either side the piers broke with a hollow note that even to my inexperienced ears seemed prophetic of wind.
"What is the weather to be, Caudel?" I called to him.
"We're going to get a breeze from the south'ard, sir," he answered; "nothing to harm, I dessay, if it don't draw westerly."
"What is your plan of sailing?"
"Can't do better, I think, sir, than stand over for the English coast, and so run down, keeping the ports conveniently aboard."