“There is good reason for that, mind you,” was the next observation he caught, made in a somewhat lower tone, and accompanied by a doubtful laugh.  “It is not for nothing that he has been out so constantly shooting sea-fowl about Torungen.”

“Would she be a—­sea-bird of that feather?  Old Jacob, I should have thought, was not the kind of man—­”

“Well, perhaps not that altogether; but the first thing she did was to come straight over here; and he has had her already taken into his own house.  I have that from the aunt.  The old woman had no suspicion of anything, but told me quite innocently that now she was to be a sort of housekeeper with the Becks.”

A slight noise above him here caused the speaker to look up.  A deadly pale young sailor was staring down at him over the ship’s side with a pair of eyes that struck him as resembling those he had once seen in the head of a mad dog.  Their owner turned away at once and crossed the deck.

“That must have been the lover!” he whispered over to the other, as he set to work with his adze upon the pencilled plank.  Shortly after he muttered in a tone of compunction—­

“If I saw that physiognomy aright, some one had better take care of himself when he gets leave ashore.”

Salve had sprung to his feet in a fury when he heard about young Beck, but the desire to hear more had kept him spellbound.  What further had been hinted of his relations with Elizabeth, and that the latter had even taken refuge in his house, seemed all only too probable.  He knew both the men who had been speaking; they were respectable folks, and the one besides had had the news from the aunt herself.

There was hard work that day on board, but his hands were as if they had been benumbed.  It was impossible for him to give any assistance, except in appearance, when any hauling was to be done;—­he did everything mechanically.

“Are you sick, lad, or longing after your sweetheart?” said the mate to him in the course of the afternoon.  He saw that there was something wrong with him.

That last, “after your sweetheart,” had a wonderfully rousing influence.  He felt himself all at once relieved of his heavy feeling of exhaustion, and worked now so hard that the perspiration poured down his face, joining in the hauling song from time to time with a wild, unnatural energy:  he was afraid to leave himself a moment for thought.  When the day was over, however, he took the anchor watch for a comrade, who was overjoyed at the unexpected prospect of getting a quiet night in his hammock, and at escaping from his turn of “ship’s dog”—­that watch consisting of one man only, whose business it is to keep the ship from harbour-thieves.

He paced up and down the deck alone in the pitchy darkness, that was only relieved by a lantern or two out in the harbour, and a light here and there up in the town—­sometimes standing for long minutes together, with his cheek on his hand, leaning on the railing.  He could, without the slightest scruple, murder young Beck—­that he felt.