“I am glad to do anything I can.”

“I am sure of that.  You are certain you are comfortable there?”

“Perfectly.”

“Then—­good-night.  And thank you.”

Unexpectedly she put out her hand, and I took it.  It was the first time I had touched her, and it went to my head.  I bent over her slim cold fingers and kissed them.  She drew her breath in sharply in surprise, but as I dropped her hand our eyes met.

“You should not have done that,” she said coolly.  “I am sorry.”

She left me utterly wretched.  What a boor she must have thought me, to misconstrue her simple act of kindness!  I loathed myself with a hatred that sent me groveling to my blanket in the pantry, and that kept me, once there, awake through all the early part of the summer night.

I wakened with a sense of oppression, of smothering heat.  I had struggled slowly back to consciousness, to realize that the door of the pantry was closed, and that I was stewing in the moist heat of the August night.  I got up, clad in my shirt and trousers, and felt my way to the door.

The storeroom and pantry of the after house had been built in during the rehabilitation of the boat, and consisted of a short passageway, with drawers for linens on either side, and beyond, lighted by a porthole, the small supply room in which I had been sleeping.

Along this passageway; then, I groped my way to the door at the end, opening into the main cabin near the chart-room door and across from Mrs. Turner’s room.  This door I had been in the habit of leaving open, for two purposes—­ventilation, and in case I might be, as Mrs. Johns had feared, required in the night.

The door was locked on the outside.

I was a moment or two in grasping the fact.  I shook it carefully to see if it had merely caught, and then, incredulous, I put my weight to it.  It refused to yield.  The silence outside was absolute.

I felt my way back to the window.  It was open, but was barred with iron, and, even without that, too small for my shoulders.  I listened for the mate.  It was still dark, and so not yet time for the watch to change.  Singleton would be on duty, and he rarely came aft.  There was no sound of footsteps.

I lit a match and examined the lock.  It was a simple one, and as my idea now was to free myself without raising an alarm, I decided to unscrew it with my pocket-knife.  I was still confused, but inclined to consider my imprisonment a jest, perhaps on the part of Charlie Jones, who tempered his religious fervor with a fondness for practical joking.

I accordingly knelt in front of the lock and opened my knife.  I was in darkness and working by touch.  I had extracted one screw, and, with a growing sense of satisfaction, was putting it in my pocket before loosening a second, when a board on which I knelt moved under my knee, lifted, as if the other end, beyond the door, had been stepped on.  There was no sound, no creak.  Merely that ominous lifting under my knee.  There was some one just beyond the door.