At this point the cab stopped, for it was in danger of being crushed like an egg-shell.  The wide Embankment which had had room for cannonballs and squadrons, had now shrunk to a cobbled lane steaming with smells of malt and oil and blocked by waggons.  While her husband read the placards pasted on the brick announcing the hours at which certain ships would sail for Scotland, Mrs. Ambrose did her best to find information.  From a world exclusively occupied in feeding waggons with sacks, half obliterated too in a fine yellow fog, they got neither help nor attention.  It seemed a miracle when an old man approached, guessed their condition, and proposed to row them out to their ship in the little boat which he kept moored at the bottom of a flight of steps.  With some hesitation they trusted themselves to him, took their places, and were soon waving up and down upon the water, London having shrunk to two lines of buildings on either side of them, square buildings and oblong buildings placed in rows like a child’s avenue of bricks.

The river, which had a certain amount of troubled yellow light in it, ran with great force; bulky barges floated down swiftly escorted by tugs; police boats shot past everything; the wind went with the current.  The open rowing-boat in which they sat bobbed and curtseyed across the line of traffic.  In mid-stream the old man stayed his hands upon the oars, and as the water rushed past them, remarked that once he had taken many passengers across, where now he took scarcely any.  He seemed to recall an age when his boat, moored among rushes, carried delicate feet across to lawns at Rotherhithe.

“They want bridges now,” he said, indicating the monstrous outline of the Tower Bridge.  Mournfully Helen regarded him, who was putting water between her and her children.  Mournfully she gazed at the ship they were approaching; anchored in the middle of the stream they could dimly read her name—­Euphrosyne.

Very dimly in the falling dusk they could see the lines of the rigging, the masts and the dark flag which the breeze blew out squarely behind.

As the little boat sidled up to the steamer, and the old man shipped his oars, he remarked once more pointing above, that ships all the world over flew that flag the day they sailed.  In the minds of both the passengers the blue flag appeared a sinister token, and this the moment for presentiments, but nevertheless they rose, gathered their things together, and climbed on deck.

Down in the saloon of her father’s ship, Miss Rachel Vinrace, aged twenty-four, stood waiting her uncle and aunt nervously.  To begin with, though nearly related, she scarcely remembered them; to go on with, they were elderly people, and finally, as her father’s daughter she must be in some sort prepared to entertain them.  She looked forward to seeing them as civilised people generally look forward to the first sight of civilised people, as though they were of the nature of an approaching physical discomfort—­a tight shoe or a draughty window.  She was already unnaturally braced to receive them.  As she occupied herself in laying forks severely straight by the side of knives, she heard a man’s voice saying gloomily: