Read "The Turnstile" by A.E.W. Mason online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
At nine o'clock on a morning of July during the next year an auxiliary barquentine of four hundred and fifty tons steamed westward with the tide past the Isle of Wight. Besides the helmsman, Cynthia and Harry Rames were upon the bridge. They stood side by side, Cynthia gripping the rail in front of her with both of her hands. They did not speak.
The ship glided past Cowes gay with its white yachts and crowded esplanade and rounded Gurnard Point into Newtown Bay. Cynthia looked ahead through a blur of tears, watching for and yet dreading to see a low square church tower stand out against the sky close to the water in a dip of the coast-line hills. Opposite to that church the ship was stopped and a boat was lowered. Cynthia, with Robert Brook to look after her, was put ashore on Yarmouth pier; and the barquentine dipped her flag and steamed on to the Needles and the open sea on its three years' voyage.