All at once, as I stood, staring, I heard the wheel behind me, spin rapidly.  Instinctively, I jumped to get hold of the spokes; for I did not want the steering gear jammed.  Then I turned again to have another look at the other ship; but, to my utter bewilderment, there was no sign of her—­nothing but the calm ocean, spreading away to the distant horizon.  I blinked my eyelids a bit, and pushed the hair off my forehead.  Then, I stared again; but there was no vestige of her—­ nothing, you know; and absolutely nothing unusual, except a faint, tremulous quiver in the air.  And the blank surface of the sea reaching everywhere to the empty horizon.

Had she foundered?  I asked myself, naturally enough; and, for the moment, I really wondered.  I searched round the sea for wreckage; but there was nothing, not even an odd hen-coop, or a piece of deck furniture; and so I threw away that idea, as impossible.

Then, as I stood, I got another thought, or, perhaps, an intuition and I asked myself seriously whether this disappearing ship might not be in some way connected with the other queer things.  It occurred to me then, that the vessel I had seen was nothing real, and, perhaps, did not exist outside of my own brain.  I considered the idea, gravely.  It helped to explain the thing, and I could think of nothing else that would.  Had she been real, I felt sure that others aboard us would have been bound to have seen her long before I had—­I got a bit muddled there, with trying to think it out; and then, abruptly, the reality of the other ship, came back to me—­every rope and sail and spar, you know.  And I remembered how she had lifted to the heave of the sea, and how the sails had flapped in the light breeze.  And the string of flags!  She had been signalling.  At that last, I found it just as impossible to believe that she had not been real.

I had reached to this point of irresolution, and was standing with my back, partly turned to the wheel.  I was holding it steady with my left hand, while I looked over the sea, to try to find something to help me to understand.

All at once, as I stared, I seemed to see the ship again.

She was more on the beam now, than on the quarter; but I thought little of that, in the astonishment of seeing her once more.  It was only a glimpse, I caught of her—­dim and wavering, as though I looked at her through the convolutions of heated air.  Then she grew indistinct, and vanished again; but I was convinced now that she was real, and had been in sight all the time, if I could have seen her.  That curious, dim, wavering appearance had suggested something to me.  I remembered the strange, wavy look of the air, a few days previously, just before the mist had surrounded the ship.  And in my mind, I connected the two.  It was nothing about the other packet that was strange.  The strangeness was with us.  It was something that was about (or invested) our ship that prevented me—­or indeed, any one else aboard from seeing that other.  It was evident that she had been able to see us, as was proved by her signalling.  In an irrelevant sort of way, I wondered what the people aboard of her thought of our apparently intentional disregard of their signals.