The trading brig Bonito appeared gliding round a sombre forest-clad point of land on the silvery estuary of a great river.  The breath of air that gave her motion would not have fluttered the flame of a torch.  She stole out into the open from behind a veil of unstirring leaves, mysteriously silent, ghostly white, and solemnly stealthy in her imperceptible progress; and Jasper, his elbow in the main rigging, and his head leaning against his hand, thought of Freya.  Everything in the world reminded him of her.  The beauty of the loved woman exists in the beauties of Nature.  The swelling outlines of the hills, the curves of a coast, the free sinuosities of a river are less suave than the harmonious lines of her body, and when she moves, gliding lightly, the grace of her progress suggests the power of occult forces which rule the fascinating aspects of the visible world.

Dependent on things as all men are, Jasper loved his vessel—­the house of his dreams.  He lent to her something of Freya’s soul.  Her deck was the foothold of their love.  The possession of his brig appeased his passion in a soothing certitude of happiness already conquered.

The full moon was some way up, perfect and serene, floating in air as calm and limpid as the glance of Freya’s eyes.  There was not a sound in the brig.

“Here she shall stand, by my side, on evenings like this,” he thought, with rapture.

And it was at that moment, in this peace, in this serenity, under the full, benign gaze of the moon propitious to lovers, on a sea without a wrinkle, under a sky without a cloud, as if all Nature had assumed its most clement mood in a spirit of mockery, that the gunboat Neptun, detaching herself from the dark coast under which she had been lying invisible, steamed out to intercept the trading brig Bonito standing out to sea.

Directly the gunboat had been made out emerging from her ambush, Schultz, of the fascinating voice, had given signs of strange agitation.  All that day, ever since leaving the Malay town up the river, he had shown a haggard face, going about his duties like a man with something weighing on his mind.  Jasper had noticed it, but the mate, turning away, as though he had not liked being looked at, had muttered shamefacedly of a headache and a touch of fever.  He must have had it very badly when, dodging behind his captain he wondered aloud:  “What can that fellow want with us?” . . .  A naked man standing in a freezing blast and trying not to shiver could not have spoken with a more harshly uncertain intonation.  But it might have been fever—­a cold fit.

“He wants to make himself disagreeable, simply,” said Jasper, with perfect good humour.  “He has tried it on me before.  However, we shall soon see.”

And, indeed, before long the two vessels lay abreast within easy hail.  The brig, with her fine lines and her white sails, looked vaporous and sylph-like in the moonlight.  The gunboat, short, squat, with her stumpy dark spars naked like dead trees, raised against the luminous sky of that resplendent night, threw a heavy shadow on the lane of water between the two ships.