Here and there in the distance she descried a sail - the brown sail
of some Ostend fishing-boat returning home after a night's
trawling. Then the beat of paddles caught her ear, and a steamer
blundered past, wallowing clumsily among the waves like a
tortoise. It was the Swallow from London. She could see some of
its passengers leaning curiously over the aft-rail. A girl in a
mackintosh signalled to her, and mechanically she answered the
salute with her arm. The officer of the bridge of the Swallow
hailed the yacht, but the man at the wheel offered no reply. In
another minute the Swallow was nothing but a blot in the distance.
Nella tried to sit straight in the deck-chair, but she found herself
unable to do so. Throwing off the rug which covered her, she
discovered that she had been tied to the chair by means of a piece
of broad webbing. Instantly she was alert, awake, angry; she knew
that her perils were not over; she felt that possibly they had
scarcely yet begun. Her lazy contentment, her dreamy sense of
peace and repose, vanished utterly, and she steeled herself to meet
the dangers of a grave and difficult situation.
Just at that moment a man came up from below. He was a man of
forty or so, clad in irreproachable blue, with a peaked yachting
cap. He raised the cap politely.
'Good morning,' he said. 'Beautiful sunrise, isn't it?' The clever and
calculated insolence of his tone cut her like a lash as she lay bound
in the chair.
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