He felt crushed, spiritually invertebrate, destitute of object in existence, bereft of all hope.  What mattered it whether he won or lost in this stupid contest whose prize was possession of a few trinkets set with bits of glittering stone?  If he won, of what avail?  What could it profit his soul to make good a vain boast to Eve de Montalais?  Would it matter to her what success or failure meant to him?  Lanyard doubted it, he doubted her, himself, all things within the compass of his understanding, and knew appalling glimpses of that everlasting truth, too passionless to be cynical, that the hopes of man and his fears, his loves and hates, his strivings and passivity, are all one in the measured and immutable processes of Time....

The pressure of a hand upon his own roused him to discover the Liane Delorme had seated herself beside him, in a chair that looked the other way, so that her face was not far from his; and he could scarcely be unaware of its hinted beauty, now wan and glimmering in starlight, enigmatic with soft, close shadows.

“I must have been dreaming,” he said, apologetic.  “You startled me.”

“One could see that, my friend.”

The woman spoke in quiet accents and let her hand linger upon his with its insistent reminder of the warm, living presence whose rich colouring was disguised by the gloom that encompassed both.

Four strokes in duplicate on the ship’s bell, then the call:  “Eight bells and a-a-all’s well!”

Lanyard muttered:  “No idea it was so late.”

A slender white shape, Mr. Collison emerged from his quarters in the deck-house beneath the bridge and ran up the ladder to relieve Mr. Swain.  At the same time a seaman came from forward and ascended by the other ladder.  Later Mr. Swain and the man whose trick at the wheel was ended left the bridge, the latter to go forward to his rest, Mr. Swain to turn into his room in the deck-house.

The hot glow of the saloon skylights became a dim refulgence, aside from which, and its glimmer in the mouth of the companionway, no lights were visible in the whole length of the ship except the shuttered window of Mr. Swain’s room, which presently was darkened, and odd glimpses of the binnacle light to be had when the helmsman shifted his stand.

A profound hush closed down upon the ship, whose progress across the face of the waters seemed to acquire a new significance of stealth, so that the two seated by the taffrail, above the throbbing screws and rushing torrent of the wake, talked in lowered accents without thinking why.

“It is that one grows bored, eh, cher ami?”

“Perhaps, Liane.”

“Or perhaps that one’s thought are constantly with one’s heart, elsewhere?”

“You think so?”

“At the Chateau de Montalais, conceivably.”

“It amuses you, then, to shoot arrows into the air?”

“But naturally, I seek the reason, when I see you distrait and am conscious of your neglect.”