There was a peasant woman dressed in black, holding an infant to her breast.  Both child and parent suffered to a distressing degree.  By some kindly dispensation of Providence they contrived to be ill in turns, and the situation might have verged on the comical but for the fact that blank despair was written on the face of the mother.  She evidently thought her last day had come, and still, in the convulsions of her pain, tried to soothe the child.  An ungainly creature, with a big scar across one cheek.  She suffered dumbly, like some poor animal.  The bishop’s heart went out to her.

He took out his watch.  Two more hours of discomfort to be gone through!  Then he looked over the water.  The goal was far distant.

Viewed from the clammy deck on this bright morning, the island of Nepenthe resembled a cloud.  It was a silvery speck upon that limitless expanse of blue sea and sky.  A south wind breathed over the Mediterranean waters, drawing up their moisture which lay couched in thick mists abut its flanks and uplands.  The comely outlines were barely suggested through a veil of fog.  An air of irreality hung about the place.  Could this be an island?  A veritable island of rocks and vineyards and houses—­this pallid apparition?  It looked like some snowy sea-bird resting upon the waves; a sea-bird or a cloud; one of those lonely clouds that stray from their fellows and drift about in wayward fashion at the bidding of every breeze.

All the better-class natives had disappeared below save an unusually fat young priest with a face like a full moon, who pretended to be immersed in his breviary but was looking out of the corner of his eye all the time at a pretty peasant girl reclining uncomfortably in a corner.  He rose and arranged the cushions to her liking.  In doing so he must have made some funny remark in her ear, for she smiled wanly as she said: 

“Grazie, Don Francesco.”

“Means thank you, I suppose,” thought the Bishop.  “But why is he a don?”

Of the other alien travellers, those charming but rather metallic American ladies had retired to the cabin; so had the English family; so had everybody, in fact.  On deck there remained of the foreign contingent nobody but himself and Mr. Muhlen, a flashy over-dressed personage who seemed to relish the state of affairs.  He paced up and down, cool as a cucumber, trying to walk like a sailor, and blandly indifferent to the agonized fellow-creatures whom the movements of the vessel caused him to touch, every now and then, with the point of his patent-leather boots.  Patent-leather boots.  That alone classes him, thought Mr. Heard.  Once he paused and remarked, in his horrible pronunciation of English: 

“That woman over there with the child!  I wonder what I would do in her place?  Throw it into the water, I fancy.  It’s often the only way of getting rid of a nuisance.”

“Rather a violent measure,” replied the Bishop politely.