to carry out an order with the mainsail. The rest had gone down
again, but Salve, who felt a longing to be alone, had remained aloft,
and was standing on the foot-rope, with his elbows resting on the yard.
Nils's sympathetic eyes had perceived from his behaviour and whole
appearance that day that there was something unusual the matter with
him; and when he saw that Salve remained behind, he remained too,
observing that it would be pleasant to cool for a while before going to
their hammocks in the close air between decks.

The sky above them blazed like a cupola "inlaid with patines of bright
gold;" obliquely from the horizon the Southern Cross was rising, and the
evening star shone in the warm night, before the moon had yet risen,
with a silver gleam that threw clear light and shadow upon the deck
below; while the vessel seemed to plough through a sea of
phosphorescence, leaving in her wake a long trail of bluish glittering
light.

From the forecastle below came wafted up a sentimental sailor's song,
the burden of which was pretty well summed up in the two concluding
lines:--

"But never more her name I'll utter till I die,
For rosy though her lips were, her heart it was a lie."

It sounded melancholy at that hour, and Nils, to judge from the
occasional sighs with which he had accompanied it, was moved. When it
came to an end, Salve turned suddenly to him.

"You are distressing yourself for another's sweetheart now, Nils. What
would you have done if it had been your own?"

"My wife!" He had evidently not for the moment taken in the idea, and
looked with all his heavy countenance at Salve.

"Yes. Wouldn't you have liked to see her sunk to the bottom of the sea?"

"My Karen to the bottom of the sea! I'd go there myself first."

"Yes; but if she had been unfaithful to you?" persisted Salve, seeming
to take a fiendish delight in bringing home the idea to the poor fellow.

"But she is not," was the rejoinder.

Nils had no genius for the abstract, and no more satisfaction was to be
got out of him. But at the same time he had been shocked, and went down
shortly after without saying a word.

Salve still remained aloft, the dull consciousness of Elizabeth's
engagement with the captain's son alternating with a more active desire
for revenge upon the captain himself for the manner in which he had
conveyed the information; and the result of his brooding up there upon
the yard was a determination to desert as