“Splendid!  Magnificent!  Glorious achievement!  Proved your point up to the hilt, my boy!”

And when I said something about not having gone all the way he cried: 

“Never mind!  You’ll do it next time,” which made some of my shipmates who were standing round with shining eyes say, “Aye, aye, sir,” and then one of them (it was good old O’Sullivan) shouted: 

“By the stars of heaven, that’s thrue, my lord!  And if anybody’s after saying that the Commanther was turned back this time by anything less than the almighty power of Nature in her wrath, you may say there’s forty-eight of us here to tell him he lies.”

“I believe it,” said the chairman, and then there were further congratulations, with messages from members of my committee, but never a word from my dear one.

Thinking the chairman might hesitate to speak of a private matter until we were alone, I took him down to my state-room.  But he had nothing to say there, either, except about articles to be written, reports to be compiled, and invitations to be accepted.

Several hours passed like this.  We were again out at sea, and my longing to know what had happened was consuming me, but I dared not ask from fear of a bad answer.

Before the night was out, however, I had gone to work in a roundabout way.  Taking O’Sullivan into my confidence, I told him it had not been my parents that I had been anxious about (God forgive me!), but somebody else whom he had seen and spoken to.

“Do you mean Mal . . .  I should say Lady . . .”

“Yes.”

“By the holy saints, the way I was thinking that when I brought you the letter at Port Said, and saw the clouds of heaven still hanging on you.”

I found that the good fellow had a similar trouble of his own (not yet having heard from his mother), so he fell readily into my plan, which was that of cross-questioning the chairman about my dear one, and I about his, and then meeting secretly and imparting what we had learned.

Anybody may laugh who likes at the thought of two big lumbering fellows afraid to face the truth (scouting round and round it), but it grips me by the throat to this day to see myself taking our chairman into a quiet corner of the smoke-room and saying: 

“Poor old O’Sullivan!  He hasn’t heard from his old mother yet.  She was sick when he sailed, and wouldn’t have parted with him to go with anybody except myself.  You haven’t heard of her, have you?”

And then to think of O’Sullivan doing the same for me, with: 

“The poor Commanther!  Look at him there.  Faith, he’s keeping a good heart, isn’t he?  But it’s just destroyed he is for want of news of a great friend that was in trouble.  It was a girl . . . a lady, I mane.  You haven’t heard the whisper of a word, sir . . . eh?”

Our chairman had heard nothing.  And when (bracing myself at last) I asked point-blank if anything had been sent to him as from me, and he answered “No,” I might have been relieved, but I wasn’t.  Though I did not know then that my darling had burnt my letter, I began to feel that she was the last person in the world to use it, being (God bless her!) of the mettle that makes a woman want to fight her own battles without asking help of any one.