She loved the water, and now it seemed deliciously right and proper that she should be on the water again.

She raised her head to look round, and then let it sink back: she was fatigued, enervated; she desired only solitude and calm; she had no care, no anxiety, no responsibility: a hundred years might have passed since her meeting with Miss Spencer, and the memory of that meeting appeared to have faded into the remotest background of her mind.
It was a small yacht, and her practised eye at once told that it belonged to the highest aristocracy of pleasure craft.

As she reclined in the deck-chair (it did not occur to her at that moment to speculate as to the identity of the person who had led her therein) she examined all visible details of the vessel.

The deck was as white and smooth as her own hand, and the seams ran along its length like blue veins.

All the brass-work, from the band round the slender funnel to the concave surface of the binnacle, shone like gold.
The tapered masts stretched upwards at a rakish angle, and the rigging seemed like spun silk.