She put the chalk down on the ledge.
"Where the moon is low, and the distance is great, it is worse," she said. "I have not seen the table, sir. But if it was made as I think it was made, it will put a ship twenty or thirty miles from where she stands on any night when the moon is far from the star. Most nights that will not matter. On the night it does matter, she will be in sight of land, and will not know it." She hesitated. "My father used to say there were shoals off the Brazils that the Portuguese named for a warning. That is all, sir. I beg your pardon for the interruption."
She went back up the side of the benches to her seat, and sat down, and found that her hands were perfectly steady and her face was burning as if she stood before a forge.
* * *
The silence lasted perhaps three seconds. It seemed very much longer.
Then Sir Augustus laughed: not loudly, but with real warmth, as a man laughs at the cleverness of a child.
"Bravo," he said. "Bravo, madam. I declare I have not seen so pretty a demonstration since my own Tripos. You have quite convinced me that you know what a cotangent is, which is more than I could say for half the young men I examined in my time." The gallery, relieved, laughed with him. "As to the rest, you will forgive me if I do not overturn eleven years of labour upon the strength of a lady's belief as to how my computers did their work. You have not seen the tables. You say so yourself. I have. I can assure you, and the gentlemen of the Admiralty, that they are sound." He turned to the President. "Shall we adjourn, sir? I think we have all been sufficiently entertained."
And that, it seemed, was that. The President rose with evident relief. People began to stand, and talk, and look about them for their hats. Along the fourth bench the Fellows and their guests turned, one after another, to look at Judith as they passed: some with amusement, some with frank disapproval, and one or two, she thought, with an expression she could not read at all.
The man in the blue coat was gone. She looked for him and could not find him.
On the black board, the porter was already wiping away the figures with the cloth. He began with hers.
* * *
"Never," said Mrs. Gage in the hackney coach, "in the whole course of my life. Never. Not when your uncle Gage brought home the cadaver in the hamper. Not when your mother ran off with your father in the middle of the Michaelmas assize. Never have I been so mortified."