The Calais boat was waiting until the other steamer had got well out of the harbor.  The fog had lifted, and the searchlight was moving over the surface.  It played round the channel steamer without touching it.  But none of this was visible to Sara Lee.

At last the lights of the quay began to recede.  The little boat rocked slightly in its own waves as it edged away.  It moved slowly through the shipping and out until, catching the swell of the channel, it shot ahead at top speed.

For an hour Sara Lee stood there.  The channel wind caught her and tore at her skirts until she was almost frozen.  And finally, in sheer desperation, she worked her way round to the other side.  She saw no one.  Save for the beating heart of the engine below it might have been a dead ship.

On the other side she found an open door and stumbled into the tiny dark deck cabin, as chilled and frightened a philanthropist as had ever crossed that old and tricky and soured bit of seaway.  And there, to be frank, she forgot her fright in as bitter a tribute of seasickness as even the channel has ever exacted.

She had locked herself in, and she fell at last into an exhausted sleep.  When she wakened and peered out through the tiny window it was gray winter dawn.  The boat was quiet, and before her lay the quay of Calais and the Gare Maritime.  A gangway was out and a hurried survey showed no one in sight.

Sara Lee picked up her suitcase and opened the door.  The fresh morning air revived her, but nevertheless it was an extremely pale young woman who, obeying Henri’s instructions, went ashore that morning in the gray dawn unseen, undisturbed and unquestioned.  But from the moment she appeared on the gangway until the double glass doors of the Gare Maritime closed behind her this apparently calm young woman did not breathe at all.  She arrived, indeed, with lungs fairly collapsed and her heart entirely unreliable.

A woman clerk was asleep at a desk.  Sara Lee roused her to half wakefulness, no interest and extremely poor English.  A drowsy porter led her up a staircase and down an endless corridor.  Then at last he was gone, and Sara Lee turned the key in her door and burst into tears.

VII

Now up to this point Sara Lee’s mind had come to rest at Calais.  She must get there; after that the other things would need to be worried over.  Henri had already in their short acquaintance installed himself as the central figure of this strange and amazing interlude—­not as a good-looking young soldier surprisingly fertile in expedients, but as a sort of agent of providence, by whom and through whom things were done.

And Henri had said she was to go to the Gare Maritime at Calais and make herself comfortable—­if she got there.  After that things would be arranged.