I broke off to kiss away a tear, and a little later she was smiling with her hand in mine, as I led her up on deck.
The mistiness had gone out of the sunlight, the pearly, vaporous curls—faint of hue as the new moon beheld in the day—which had given a look of marble to the sky, had melted out or been settled by the breeze over to the English coast, and now the heavens were a pale blue, piebald with bodies of white vapour streaming up out of the south and touching the green and creaming stretch of waters with shadows of violet. There was more warmth in the sun than I should have looked for at that time of the year, and I speedily made Grace comfortable in a chair, a little distance from the tiller—in other words, out of earshot of the helmsman; I snugged her in rugs, and Caudel further sheltered her by what he called a hurricane house—a square of canvas "seized" above the line of the bulwark rail.
She gazed about her out of the wraps which rose to her ears with eyes full of childlike interest and wonder, not unmixed with fear, I saw her eagerly watching the action of the yacht as the little fabric leaned to a sea with a long, sideways, floating plunge that brought the yeast of the broken waters bubbling and hissing to the very line of her lee forecastle bulwark; then she would clasp my hand as though startled when the dandy craft brought the weight of her white canvas to windward on the heave of the underrunning sea with a sound as of drums and bugles heard afar echoing down out of the glistening concavities and ringing out of the taut rigging upon which the blue and brilliant morning breeze was splitting.
She had not been sitting long before I saw that she was beginning to like it. There was no nausea now; her eyes were bright, there was colour in her cheeks; and her red lips lay parted as though in pure enjoyment of the glad rush of the salt breeze athwart her teeth of pearl.
We had a deal to say to each other as you may suppose, and so much of the nonsense that lovers will utter went to our talk that I should be sorry to record what was said. Caudel, conning the little ship, hung about removed from us, but I would often catch his sea-blue eye furtively directed at Grace as though he could not look at her often enough. The boy Bobby came and went betwixt the forecastle hatch and the companion; the fellow at the helm swung upon the tiller with an occasional peep at the broad wake racing, fanshaped, from under the counter into the troubled toss and windy distance, as though he wished to make sure that he was steering straight; the other two of my crew were at work forward on jobs to which, not being a sailor, I should be unable to give a name.
Thus passed the morning. There was no tedium. If ever there came a halt in our chat there were twenty things over the side to look at, to fill the pause with colour and beauty. It might be a tall, slate-coloured, steam tank, hideous with gaunt leaning funnel and famished pole-masts, and black fans of propeller beating at the stern-post like the vanes of a drowning windmill amid a hill of froth, yet poetised in spite of herself into a pretty detail of the surrounding life through the mere impulse and spirit of the bright seas through which she was starkly driving. Or it was a full-rigged ship, homeward bound, with yearning canvas and ocean-worn sides, figures on her poop crossing from rail to rail to look at what was passing, and seamen on her forecastle busy with the ship's ground tackle.
It was shortly after twelve that the delicate shadow of the high land of Beachy Head showed over the yacht's bow. By one o'clock it had grown defined and firm, with the glimmering streak of its white ramparts of chalk stealing out of the blue haze.
"There's Old England, Grace!" said I. "How one's heart goes out to the sight of the merest shadow of one's own soil! The Spitfire has seen the land; has she not quickened her pace?"
"I ought to wish it was the Cornwall coast," she answered; "but I am enjoying this now," she added smiling.
"How close do you intend to run in?" I called to Caudel.