On the seventh day the course pricked on the chart placed the Sybarite’s position at noon as approximately in mid-Atlantic.  Contemplating a prospect of seven days more of such emptiness, Lanyard’s very soul yawned.

And nothing could induce Captain Monk to hasten the passage.  Mr. Mussey asserted that his engines could at a pinch deliver twenty knots an hour; yet day in and day out the Sybarite poked along at little better than half that speed.  It was no secret that Liane Delorme’s panic flight from Popinot had hurried the yacht out of Cherbourg harbour four days earlier than her proposed sailing date, whereas the Sybarite had a rendezvous to keep with her owner at a certain hour of a certain night, an appointment carefully calculated with consideration for the phase of the moon and the height of the tide, therefore not readily to be altered.

After dinner on that seventh day, a meal much too long drawn out for Lanyard’s liking, and marked to boot by the consumption of much too much champagne, he left the main saloon the arena of an impromptu poker party, repaired to the quarterdeck, and finding a wicker lounge chair by the taffrail subsided into it with a sigh of gratitude for this fragrant solitude of night, so soothing and serene.

The Sybarite, making easy way through a slight sea, with what wind there was—­not much—­on the port bow, rolled but slightly, and her deliberate and graceful fore-and-aft motion, as she swung from crest to crest of the endless head-on swells, caused the stars to stream above her mast-heads, a boundless river of broken light.  The pulsing of the engines, unhasting, unresting, ran through her fabric in ceaseless succession of gentle tremors, while the rumble of their revolutions resembled the refrain of an old, quiet song.  The mechanism of the patent log hummed and clicked more obtrusively.  Directly underfoot the screw churned a softly clashing wake.  From the saloon companionway drifted intermittently a confusion of voices, Liane’s light laughter, muted clatter of chips, now and then the sound of a popping cork.  Forward the ship’s bell sounded two double strokes, then a single, followed by a wail in minor key:  “Five bells and all’s well!” ...  And of a sudden Lanyard suffered the melancholy oppression of knowing his littleness of body and soul, the relative insignificance even of the ship, that impertinent atom of human organization which traversed with unabashed effrontery the waters of the ages, beneath the shining constellations of eternity.  In profound psychical enervation he perceived with bitterness and despair the enormous futility of all things mortal, the hopelessness of effort, the certain black defeat that waits upon even what men term success.