When they entered the cab, Courtney ensconced himself in the remote corner of the other seat from Lefevre; and thus without another word they drove to the Embankment.  At the foot of the steps by Cleopatra’s Needle, they found a waterman and a boat in waiting.  They entered the boat, Lefevre going forward while Julius sat down at the tiller.  The waterman pulled out.  The tide was ebbing, and they slipped swiftly down the dark river, with broken reflections of lamps and lanterns on either bank streaming deep into the water like molten gold as they passed, and with tall buildings and chimney-shafts showing black against the calm night sky.  Lefevre found it necessary at intervals to assure himself that he was not drifting in a dream, or that the ghastly, burning-eyed figure, wrapped in a dark cloak in the stern, was not a strange visitor from the nether world.

Soon after they had shot through London Bridge they were alongside a yacht almost in mid-stream.  It was clear that all had been prearranged for Julius’s arrival; for as soon as they were on board, the yacht (loosed from her upper mooring by the waterman who had brought them down the river) began to stand away.

“We had better go forward,” said Courtney.  “Are you warm enough?”

The doctor answered that he was.  Courtney gave an order to one of the men, who went below and returned with a fur-lined coat which his master put on.  That little incident gave a curious shock to Lefevre:  it made him think of the mysterious stranger who had sat down opposite the young officer in the Brighton train, and it showed him that he had not been completely satisfied that his friend Julius and the person he had been wont to think of as Hernando Courtney were one and the same.

They went forward to be free of the sail and its tackling.  Courtney, wrapped in his extra, his fur-lined coat, pointing to a low folding-chair for Lefevre, threw himself on a heap of cordage.  He looked around and above him, at the rippling, flashing water and the black hulls of ships, and at the serene, starlit heavens stretching over all.

“How wonderful!—­how beautiful it all is!” he exclaimed.  “All, all!—­even the dullest and deadest-seeming things are vibrating, palpitating with the very madness of life!  He set the world in my heart, and oh, how I loved!—­how I loved the world!”

“It is a wonderful world,” said Lefevre, trying to speak cheerfully; “and you will take delight in it again when this abnormal fit of depression is over.”

“Never, Lefevre!—­never, never!” said Courtney in strenuous tones.  “I regret it deeply, bitterly, madly,—­but yet I know that I have about done with it!”

“Julius,” said Lefevre, “I have been so amazed and bewildered, that I have found little to say:  I can scarcely believe that you are in very deed the Julius I have known for years.  But now let me remind you I am your friend—­”

“Thank you, Lefevre.”