I grew cold and wondered what was wrong.  I dimly saw Captain Blaise come running to me.  “Guy!  Guy!” he called.  I remember also myself saying, “Nothing wrong with me, sir—­and no harm if there is.  It’s sunrise on the Slave Coast and the Dancing Bess she’s homeward bound!”

V

The blue-belted Trades!  Day and day, week and week, the little curly, white-headed seas, the unspecked blue sky, and the ceaseless caress of the pursuing wind.  No yard nor sail, never a bowline, sheet, or halyard to be handled, and the Bess bounding ever ahead.  Beauty, peace, and a leaping log—­could the sea bring greater joy?

Captain Blaise had located the bullet—­the second shot it must have been—­which had lodged under my right shoulder and cut it out.  We were nearing home, and the fever was now gone from me, but I was not yet able to take my part on deck.  “Perhaps to-morrow,” she had said.  And to-morrow was come, and I lay there thinking, and at times trying to write.

She had left me alone for a while.  Her father had called her to hear another of the Captain’s stories.  Through the cabin skylight I could see her, or at least the curve of her chin, and her tanned throat and one shoulder pressing inward under the skylight shutters.  Her face was turned toward Captain Blaise, whose head and shoulders, he pacing and turning on the quarter, came regularly within range.  But she was not forgetting me; every few minutes she thrust her head beneath the raised skylight hatches and looked down to see that I wanted for nothing, and always she smiled.

I was propped up in an easy chair.  Up to two days back I had been on a cot.  Mr. Cunningham had improved so rapidly that for more than a week now he had been allowed on deck, and there he was now, as I said, listening with his daughter to the tales of Captain Blaise.  His laughter and her breaths of suspense, I could hear the one and feel the other.

I took up my pad of paper and resumed my writing.  And reviewing my writing, I had to smile at myself, even as I used to smile at Captain Blaise when he would submit his couplets or quatrains for my judgment.  He might marshal off-hand a stanza or two of his vagabond thoughts, but here was I carefully composing with pencil and paper, and had been for a week now.

I had never been ill before, never for five minutes.  And this illness had driven me to a strange introspection.  There had been time to think.  I smiled at Captain Blaise’s amateurish rhymings on the veranda of the manor-house.  I had condemned him in my own mind for this death or that death of his irregular career; on that last night on the veranda I had even allowed him to read my thoughts of such matters.  And now I could not recollect of his having ever killed or maimed except in defence of his life or property; and yet that night in Momba I had shot, caring not whether I killed or no.  Self-defence?  At