The
motion of the cradle was the smooth rolling of the vessel; the beat
was the beat of its screw; the strange colours were the cloud tints
thrown by the sun as it rose over a distant and receding shore in the
wake of the yacht; her mother's lullaby was the crooned song of
the man at the wheel. Nella all through her life had had many
experiences of yachting. From the waters of the River Hudson to
those bluer tides of the Mediterranean Sea, she had yachted in all
seasons and all weathers. She loved the water, and now it seemed
deliciously right and proper that she should be on the water again.
She raised her head to look round, and then let it sink back:
she was fatigued, enervated; she desired only solitude and calm;
she had no care, no anxiety, no responsibility: a hundred years
might have passed since her meeting with Miss Spencer, and the
memory of that meeting appeared to have faded into the remotest
background of her mind.
It was a small yacht, and her practised eye at once told that it
belonged to the highest aristocracy of pleasure craft. As she
reclined in the deck-chair (it did not occur to her at that moment to
speculate as to the identity of the person who had led her therein)
she examined all visible details of the vessel. The deck was as
white and smooth as her own hand, and the seams ran along its
length like blue veins. All the brass-work, from the band round the
slender funnel to the concave surface of the binnacle, shone like
gold.
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