The little party in the cabin, so disastrously begun, finished, under the mellowing influence of wine and woman, in excellent feeling and with some hilarity.  Mamie, in a plush Gainsborough hat and a gown of wine-coloured silk, sat, an apparent queen, among her rude surroundings and companions.  The dusky litter of the cabin set off her radiant trimness:  tarry Johnson was a foil to her fair beauty; she glowed in that poor place, fair as a star; until even I, who was not usually of her admirers, caught a spark of admiration; and even the captain, who was in no courtly humour, proposed that the scene should be commemorated by my pencil.  It was the last act of the evening.  Hurriedly as I went about my task, the half-hour had lengthened out to more than three before it was completed:  Mamie in full value, the rest of the party figuring in outline only, and the artist himself introduced in a back view, which was pronounced a likeness.  But it was to Mamie that I devoted the best of my attention; and it was with her I made my chief success.

“O!” she cried, “am I really like that?  No wonder Jim ...”  She paused.  “Why it’s just as lovely as he’s good!” she cried:  an epigram which was appreciated, and repeated as we made our salutations, and called out after the retreating couple as they passed away under the lamplight on the wharf.

Thus it was that our farewells were smuggled through under an ambuscade of laughter, and the parting over ere I knew it was begun.  The figures vanished, the steps died away along the silent city front; on board, the men had returned to their labours, the captain to his solitary cigar; and after that long and complex day of business and emotion, I was at last alone and free.  It was, perhaps, chiefly fatigue that made my heart so heavy.  I leaned at least upon the house, and stared at the foggy heaven, or over the rail at the wavering reflection of the lamps, like a man that was quite done with hope and would have welcomed the asylum of the grave.  And all at once, as I thus stood, the City of Pekin flashed into my mind, racing her thirteen knots for Honolulu, with the hated Trent—­perhaps with the mysterious Goddedaal—­on board; and with the thought, the blood leaped and careered through all my body.  It seemed no chase at all; it seemed we had no chance, as we lay there bound to iron pillars, and fooling away the precious moments over tins of beans.  “Let them get there first!” I thought.  “Let them!  We can’t be long behind.”  And from that moment, I date myself a man of a rounded experience:  nothing had lacked but this, that I should entertain and welcome the grim thought of bloodshed.

It was long before the toil remitted in the cabin, and it was worth my while to get to bed; long after that, before sleep favoured me; and scarce a moment later (or so it seemed) when I was recalled to consciousness by bawling men and the jar of straining hawsers.