“Perhaps you’re right, Hilda,” I answered, taking a seat beside her and throwing away my cigar.  “This is one of the worst bits on the French coast that we’re approaching.  We’re not far off Ushant.  I wish the captain were on the bridge instead of this helter-skelter, self-conceited young fellow.  He’s too cock-sure.  He knows so much about seamanship that he could take a ship through any rocks on his course, blindfold—­in his own opinion.  I always doubt a man who is so much at home in his subject that he never has to think about it.  Most things in this world are done by thinking.”

“We can’t see the Ushant light,” Hilda remarked, looking ahead.

“No; there’s a little haze about on the horizon, I fancy.  See, the stars are fading away.  It begins to feel damp.  Sea mist in the Channel.”

Hilda sat uneasily in her deck-chair.  “That’s bad,” she answered; “for the first officer is taking no more heed of Ushant than of his latter end.  He has forgotten the existence of the Breton coast.  His head is just stuffed with Mrs. Ogilvy’s eyelashes.  Very pretty, long eyelashes, too; I don’t deny it; but they won’t help him to get through the narrow channel.  They say it’s dangerous.”

“Dangerous!” I answered.  “Not a bit of it—­with reasonable care.  Nothing at sea is dangerous—­except the inexplicable recklessness of navigators.  There’s always plenty of sea-room—­if they care to take it.  Collisions and icebergs, to be sure, are dangers that can’t be avoided at times, especially if there’s fog about.  But I’ve been enough at sea in my time to know this much at least—­that no coast in the world is dangerous except by dint of reckless corner-cutting.  Captains of great ships behave exactly like two hansom-drivers in the streets of London; they think they can just shave past without grazing; and they do shave past nine times out of ten.  The tenth time they run on the rocks through sheer recklessness, and lose their vessel; and then, the newspapers always ask the same solemn question—­in childish good faith—­how did so experienced and able a navigator come to make such a mistake in his reckoning?  He made no mistake; he simply tried to cut it fine, and cut it too fine for once, with the result that he usually loses his own life and his passengers.  That’s all.  We who have been at sea understand that perfectly.”

Just at that moment another passenger strolled up and joined us—­a Bengal Civil servant.  He drew his chair over by Hilda’s, and began discussing Mrs. Ogilvy’s eyes and the first officer’s flirtations.  Hilda hated gossip, and took refuge in generalities.  In three minutes the talk had wandered off to Ibsen’s influence on the English drama, and we had forgotten the very existence of the Isle of Ushant.