He arose at daylight and started cautiously to open the door.  Faint sounds in the passage alarmed him, and remaining concealed he saw Freya coming out.  This unexpected sight deprived him of all power to move away from the crack of the door.  It was the narrowest crack possible, but commanding the view of the end of the verandah.  Freya made for that end hastily to watch the brig passing the point.  She wore her dark dressing-gown; her feet were bare, because, having fallen asleep towards the morning, she ran out headlong in her fear of being too late.  Heemskirk had never seen her looking like this, with her hair drawn back smoothly to the shape of her head, and hanging in one heavy, fair tress down her back, and with that air of extreme youth, intensity, and eagerness.  And at first he was amazed, and then he gnashed his teeth.  He could not face her at all.  He muttered a curse, and kept still behind the door.

With a low, deep-breathed “Ah!” when she first saw the brig already under way, she reached for Nelson’s long glass reposing on brackets high up the wall.  The wide sleeve of the dressing-gown slipped back, uncovering her white arm as far as the shoulder.  Heemskirk gripping the door-handle, as if to crush it, felt like a man just risen to his feet from a drinking bout.

And Freya knew that he was watching her.  She knew.  She had seen the door move as she came out of the passage.  She was aware of his eyes being on her, with scornful bitterness, with triumphant contempt.

“You are there,” she thought, levelling the long glass.  “Oh, well, look on, then!”

The green islets appeared like black shadows, the ashen sea was smooth as glass, the clear robe of the colourless dawn, in which even the brig appeared shadowy, had a hem of light in the east.  Directly Freya had made out Jasper on deck, with his own long glass directed to the bungalow, she laid hers down and raised both her beautiful white arms above her head.  In that attitude of supreme cry she stood still, glowing with the consciousness of Jasper’s adoration going out to her figure held in the field of his glass away there, and warmed, too, by the feeling of evil passion, the burning, covetous eyes of the other, fastened on her back.  In the fervour of her love, in the caprice of her mind, and with that mysterious knowledge of masculine nature women seem to be born to, she thought: 

“You are looking on—­you will—­you must!  Then you shall see something.”

She brought both her hands to her lips, then flung them out, sending a kiss over the sea, as if she wanted to throw her heart along with it on the deck of the brig.  Her face was rosy, her eyes shone.  Her repeated, passionate gesture seemed to fling kisses by the hundred again and again and again, while the slowly ascending sun brought the glory of colour to the world, turning the islets green, the sea blue, the brig below her white—­dazzlingly white in the spread of her wings—­with the red ensign streaming like a tiny flame from the peak.