The empty crosstree, ready to crucify him again when he could climb the mast, raked the moon.

He had only an hour until the eastern sky would lighten and, he hoped, bring back the trades.

He decided to heave-to in the surge, replace the ruined jib, and take a look at the sodden chart below.

As he nudged the bow into the wind, he heard M. le Chat mewing and saw his dark shape in the starboard scupper. He had not had time to feed it at all. He still blamed it for Lindy.

The cat glared up at him. Its eyes shone ruddily in the binnacle light. It stretched, crouched, and shifted its gaze back to the lazarette.

Mitch put out a bare foot and prodded him forward, out of danger. He didn’t really want to lose it. The cat regarded him with contempt and slunk forward.

Mitch followed him, dragged the spare jib topside through the forward hatch, and unhanked the tatters of the old one drooping from the forestay. He began automatically to cut loose the hanks to save them. They were hard to find in Tahiti, expensive anywhere. He froze, appalled.

To save sailing gear was to give up. He was selling the boat. Only if he didn’t find her would he sail on. He saw himself cruising endlessly, lonely in the company of a succession of Mahura’s, draining him as they themselves grew old before his eyes.

He flung the hanks into the sea. She was there, alive, and he would find her, and they were heading home. He would need no hanks, or anything else.

He set the spare jib, dragged himself below to the chart table, and found it had been drenched by the passing squall. He could barely make out his track on the chart. But if he didn’t spot the strobe by dawn, it made no difference anyway. He was near her, if she lived. So he simply charted a rough dead-reckoning and went back topside. He jammed the engine in forward and began a square-search: fifteen minutes and a ninety-degree left turn, thirty minutes and another, forty-five minutes and another, an hour and another.

The clock chimed seven bells—0330. She had been in the water over twenty-four hours. Fifty minutes, he estimated, to first light.

He went topside. He saw nothing. He wondered if the strobe had gone out, or drifted too far, or sunk:

But until daylight, it was all he had to look for.

She left Papeete with the cat because Yvonne heard they were going. Although they said goodbye quietly to Jean-Paul and Taarii and tried to slip from their moorings before dawn to avoid farewells, the waitress was there with M. le Chat before they could warp away from the quay. Yvonne’s chatter aroused the little Dutch girl, who awakened her parents, and when they actually winched out, their anchor was fouled again in Xanadu’s.