not remember on which side of the gulf the ship was. But he pulled himself together at once. His first orders were: “Hard up. Shiver the main and mizen topsails!”—which was perfectly right, and it seems that he heard the sails actually fluttering. “But she was too slow in going off,” Wilmot went on telling me, his dirty face twitching and the damned carter’s whip shaking in his hand. “She seemed to stick fast.” The flutter of the canvas above his head ceased. At this critical moment the wind hauled aft with a gust again, filling the sails, and sending the ship with a great way upon the rocks on her lee bow. She had been too slow and had overreached herself in her last little game. Her time had come—the hour, the man, the blind night, the gust of wind, the right woman to put an end to her. She deserved nothing better. Strange are the instruments of Providence! There’s a sort of poetical justice, too. …’

The man in tweeds looked hard at me.

‘The first ledge she went over stripped the false keel off her. Rip! The skipper, rushing out of his berth, found a crazy girl in a red dressing-gown flying round and round the saloon, screeching like a cockatoo—the next bump knocked her clean under the cabin table. It also started the stern-post and carried away the rudder. And then the brute ran up on to a shelving rocky shore, tearing her bottom out, till she stopped and the foremast dropped over the bows like a gangway.’

‘Anybody lost?’ I asked.

‘No—unless that fellow Wilmot, and that’s rather worse than death,’ answered the gentleman unknown to Miss Blank, looking round for his cap. ‘They got ashore all right. She didn’t begin to break up till next day. … Rain left off,’ he went on. ‘I must get on my bike. I live in Herne Bay^*—came out for a spin this morning.’

He nodded at me in a friendly way and went out with a swagger.

‘Do you know who he is, Jermyn?’ I asked.

The North Sea pilot shook his head dismally. ‘I’m waiting for my ship to come down,’ he said in a lugubrious tone, again spreading his damp handkerchief like a curtain before the glowing grate.

On going out, I exchanged a glance and a smile (strictly proper) with the respectable Miss Blank, barmaid of the Three Crows.