'She is old, but she is a stout ship,' he answered. 'She will be afloat when scores of what you might consider beauties have vanished.'

'I think not,' said I, looking towards Helga, and wondering what the man had been saying to her.

'Let us hope,' he exclaimed, lifting a great pilot coat from the locker and struggling into it, 'that the necessity for your remaining here will not last very much longer. I should have expected handsomer treatment at your hands, Mr. Tregarthen.'

'I do not know what you can find to base such an expectation on,' I cried. 'Your detention of us is cruel, and, as I hope and believe, punishable. But there is no good in discussing that matter with you here and now. I have merely to beg that we may be as strangers while we are so unfortunate as to be together in the same ship.'

He drew his sou'-wester down upon his head, surveying me meanwhile; but I witnessed no malevolence in his regard; indeed, I may say, no trace of temper. His enduring smile lay broad with such expansion, indeed, as gave an air of elation to his face.

'No,' said he, wagging his head, while he slipped the elastic band of his sou'-wester behind his whisker; 'we will not live together as strangers, as you desire. Brotherly love is still practicable, and nothing that you can say or do, my young friend, shall dissuade me from cultivating it. That we shall be long together I do not believe,' he added, with a significance that astonished me and sent my eyes askant at Helga, whose back was still upon us. 'Meanwhile, endeavour to be contented. To have content is to have all, and to have all is to be richer than the richest.'

He inclined his sou'-westered head in an odd benedictory, grotesque nod, or bow, and, with a half-pause in his manner as though he would call some speech to Helga, turned on his heel and went on deck.

'What has he been saying, Helga?'

She looked round, and, finding the Captain gone, came to my side and locked her fingers upon my arm. She had drawn to me with a pale face, but the blood flushed her throat and cheeks as she let fall her eyes from mine. I had never before thought her so sweet as she showed at that moment. She was without a hat, and her short fair hair glimmered on her head in the gathering gloom of the evening with a sheen like the glancing of bright amber. My memory gave me a thought full of beauty—a wild caprice of sentiment at such a time:

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