contriving to miss altogether the patch of good holding ground, because, forsooth, he had caught sight of Hermann’s niece on the poop.  And so did I; and probably as soon as he had seen her himself.  I saw the modest, sleek glory of the tawny head, and the full, grey shape of the girlish print frock she filled so perfectly, so satisfactorily, with the seduction of unfaltering curves—­a very nymph of Diana the Huntress.  And Diana the ship sat, high-walled and as solid as an institution, on the smooth level of the water, the most uninspiring and respectable craft upon the seas, useful and ugly, devoted to the support of domestic virtues like any grocer’s shop on shore.  At once Falk steamed away; for there was some work for him to do.  He would return in the evening.

He ranged close by us, passing out dead slow, without a hail.  The beat of the paddle-wheels reverberating amongst the stony islets, as if from the ruined walls of a vast arena, filled the anchorage confusedly with the clapping sounds of a mighty and leisurely applause.  Abreast of Hermann’s ship he stopped the engines; and a profound silence reigned over the rocks, the shore and the sea, for the time it took him to raise his hat aloft before the nymph of the grey print frock.  I had snatched up my binoculars, and I can answer for it she didn’t stir a limb, standing by the rail shapely and erect, with one of her hands grasping a rope at the height of her head, while the way of the tug carried slowly past her the lingering and profound homage of the man.  There was for me an enormous significance in the scene, the sense of having witnessed a solemn declaration.  The die was cast.  After such a manifestation he couldn’t back out.  And I reflected that it was nothing whatever to me now.  With a rush of black smoke belching suddenly out of the funnel, and a mad swirl of paddle-wheels provoking a burst of weird and precipitated clapping, the tug shot out of the desolate arena.  The rocky islets lay on the sea like the heaps of a cyclopean ruin on a plain; the centipedes and scorpions lurked under the stones; there was not a single blade of grass in sight anywhere, not a single lizard sunning himself on a boulder by the shore.  When I looked again at Hermann’s ship the girl had disappeared.  I could not detect the smallest dot of a bird on the immense sky, and the flatness of the land continued the flatness of the sea to the naked line of the horizon.

This is the setting now inseparably connected with my knowledge of Falk’s misfortune.  My diplomacy had brought me there, and now I had only to wait the time for taking up the role of an ambassador.  My diplomacy was a success; my ship was safe; old Gambril would probably live; a feeble sound of a tapping hammer came intermittently from the Diana.  During the afternoon I looked at times at the old homely ship, the faithful nurse of Hermann’s progeny, or yawned towards the distant temple of Buddha, like a lonely hillock on the plain, where shaven priests