ough the cabin skylight I could see
her, or at least the curve of her chin, and her tanned throat and one
shoulder pressing inward under the skylight shutters. Her face was
turned toward Captain Blaise, whose head and shoulders, he pacing and
turning on the quarter, came regularly within range. But she was not
forgetting me; every few minutes she thrust her head beneath the raised
skylight hatches and looked down to see that I wanted for nothing, and
always she smiled.

I was propped up in an easy chair. Up to two days back I had been on a
cot. Mr. Cunningham had improved so rapidly that for more than a week
now he had been allowed on deck, and there he was now, as I said,
listening with his daughter to the tales of Captain Blaise. His laughter
and her breaths of suspense, I could hear the one and feel the other.

I took up my pad of paper and resumed my writing. And reviewing my
writing, I had to smile at myself, even as I used to smile at Captain
Blaise when he would submit his couplets or quatrains for my judgment.
He might marshal off-hand a stanza or two of his vagabond thoughts, but
here was I carefully composing with pencil and paper, and had been for a
week now.

I had never been ill before, never for five minutes. And this illness
had driven me to a strange introspection. There had been time to think.
I smiled at Captain Blaise's amateurish rhymings on the veranda of the
manor-house. I had condemned him in my own mind for this death or that
death of his irregular career; on that last night on the veranda I had
even allowed him to read my thoughts of such matters. And now I could
not recollect of his having ever killed or maimed except in defence of
his life or property; and yet that night in Momba I had shot, caring not
whether I killed or no. Self-defence? At the instant of shooting I had
thought, had almost spoken it aloud: "There! There's for a channel to
let the starlight into your unclean brain." Self-defence? Tish! The
Governor's son desired, possibly loved in his way, a girl that I had
known no longer than I knew him, and there it was--I loved her, too!
Captain Blaise himself had probably never killed on less provocation;
and meditating on his emotional side, on his many provocations, his
life-long environment, I had to concede that the Captain Blaise I
condemned was a less guilty man than I.

This, as I was beginning to see, was but an argument with myself for a
final dismissal of my old life. Surel