The two boatmen were holding a small hoarse argument touching the
superiority of certain galley-punts belonging to Deal, when the dawn
broke along the port-beam of the lugger. The sea turned an ashen green,
and throbbed darkening to the gray wall of eastern sky, against which it
washed in a line of inky blackness. I sprang on to a thwart to look
ahead on either bow, and Helga stood up beside me; and as upon the
barque, and as upon the raft, so now we stood together sweeping the
iron-gray sky and the dark line of horizon for any flaw that might
denote a vessel. But the sea stretched bald to its recesses the compass
round.The heavens in the east brightened, and the sea-line changed into a steely whiteness, but this delicate distant horizontal gleam of water before sunrise gave us sight of nothing.  

"Anything to be seen, sir?" cried Abraham.  

"Nothing," I answered, dismounting from the thwart.  

"Well, there's all day before ye," said Jacob, who had taken the helm.  

Now that daylight was come, my first look was at Helga, to see how she had borne the bitter time that was passed. Her eyelids were heavy, her cheeks of a deathlike whiteness, her lips pale, and in the tender hollow under each eye lay a greenish hue, resembling the shadow a spring leaf might fling. It was clear that she had been secretly weeping from time to time during the dark hours. She smiled when our eyes met, and her face was instantly sweetened by the expression into the gentle prettiness I had first found in her.  

I next took a survey of my new companions. The man styled Abraham was a sailorly-looking fellow, corresponding but indifferently with one's imagination of the conventional 'longshoreman. He had sharp features, a keen, iron-gray, seawardly eye, and a bunch of reddish beard stood forth from his chin. He was dressed in pilot-cloth, wore earrings, and his head was encased in a sugar-loafed felt hat, built after the fashion of a theatrical bandit's.  

Jacob, on the other hand, was the most faithful copy of a Deal boatman that could have been met afloat. His face was flat and broad, with a skin stained in places of a brick-red. He had little, merry, but rather dim blue eyes, and suggested a man who would be able, without great effort of memory, to tell you how many public-houses there were in Deal, taking them all round. He had the whitest teeth I had ever seen in a sailor, and the glance of them through his lips 

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