Page:Guy Boothby - The Beautiful White Devil.djvu/62

 came on deck, and hard upon sundown. The great round sun, which had been so busy all day long, now rested in a bed of opal cloud scarcely a hand's breadth above the edge of the horizon. The breeze had moderated, since midday, and now the water around us was almost without a ripple, but glorified with flakes and blotches of almost every colour known to man. Near at hand it was a mixture of lemon and silver, a little further almost a lilac-purple, further still a touch of pale heliotrope meeting salmon-pink and old gold, while under the sun itself a blotch of red, fierce as a clot of blood, worked through the cloud till it got back to gold, then to salmon-pink, then through purple up again to the lemon and silver sky. It was a wonderful sunset, and a fitting termination to an extraordinary day.

After dinner, of which I partook in the officer's mess-room, I returned to the deck. It was nearly eight o'clock, and as fine a night as I had seen since I came into the East. Lighting a cigar I walked aft, and, leaning upon the taffrail, scanned the quiet sea. Situated as I was, it is not to be wandered at that a variety of thoughts thronged my brain. I tried to think what my dear old mother would have said could she have seen the position my over-rash acceptance of a tempting offer had placed me in. From my mother, who, with my father, had been dead nearly five years, my thoughts passed on to other relatives—to a girl whom I had once thought I loved, but who had jilted me in favour of a brother student. The old heartache was almost gone now, but it had been a most unfortunate affair; since then, however, I flattered myself, I had been