ache, he found Bompard's tinder-box and the Swedish
match box belonging to La Touche. He had given the woman life and she
had given him tobacco and sometimes, sitting in the adjoining cave and
smoking between nursing times, he would bring his big fist down on his
thigh, just that.

Here was a woman starving to death and dying of thirst with food enough
for a ship's company at her elbow. And the tobacco! Where was the
explanation? She was able to speak a little now. She had spoken at first
in French, which he could not understand, then she spoke in English as
good as his; another mystery. A woman all gone to pieces that spoke two
tongues and was different somehow from any woman he had ever known.

Then the things she had said: "Who are you? I am not dreaming this? Are
you really, really, truly--Oh, _don't_ leave me." Crazy talk like that.
And it was always "Oh, don't leave me." Then he would lay his pipe down
carefully on the sand of the cave and pass through the sheeting rain to
have a look at her. Sometimes she would have dozed off and he could get
back to his pipe, sometimes she was awake and then he would have to sit
down beside her and hold her hand and stroke it or play with her fingers
just as one plays with the fingers of a child. At these moments he was
transformed, he was no longer a man, he was a mother, and the hand that
could break down the resistance of a bellying sail was the hand of a
child. He no longer thought of her as the "poor woman," an infant is
sexless, so did she seem, or so would she have seemed had he thought of
the matter. He didn't. As a matter of fact thought was not his strong
suit in the game of life. He was a man from the world of Things. That
was why, perhaps, he made such a good sick nurse. He did not fuss, nor
talk, his touch was firm, firm as his determination to "get food into
her" and his hand, big as a ham, was delicate because it was the hand of
a perfect steersman. It was used to handling women in the form of three
thousand ton ships, coaxing them, humouring them--up to a point.

He fed her now from one of the tin cups. Every two hours of the day,
unless she was asleep, half a cupful of food went into her whether she
liked it or not; "hot stuff," for though the firewood was done he found
that the blubber alone was the best fuel in the world.

On the second day she was able to raise herself up, and once when he
came in he found that she had been moving about the cave and that sh