"What you been doing?" she questioned, with delicacy.

"I took a strange man by the hand," said Audrey, choosing her words
queerly, as she sometimes did, to produce a dramatic effect.

"This morning?"

"Yes. Eight o'clock."

"What? Is there a strange man in the village?"

"You don't mean to say you haven't seen the yacht!"

"Yacht?" Miss Ingate showed some excitement.

"Come and look, Winnie," said Audrey, who occasionally thought fit to
address Miss Ingate in the manner of the elder generation. She drew Miss
Ingate to the window.

Between the brown curtains Mozewater, the broad, shallow estuary of the
Moze, was spread out glittering in the sunshine which could not get into
the chilly room. The tide was nearly at full, and the estuary looked like a
mighty harbour for great ships; but in six hours it would be reduced to a
narrow stream winding through mud flats of marvellous ochres, greens, and
pinks. In the hazy distance a fitful white flash showed where ocean waves
were breaking on a sand-bank. And in the foreground, against a disused Hard
that was a couple of hundred yards lower down than the village Hard, a
large white yacht was moored, probably the largest yacht that had ever
threaded that ticklish navigation. She was a shallow-draft barge-yacht,
rigged like a Thames barge, and her whiteness and the glint of her brass,