e
means to do it some time, but perhaps he cannot think of torture
exquisite enough for his purpose.

11. My husband came in about four in the afternoon, looking so
vindictive that my heart stood still. He gradually worked himself into a
frenzy, and aimed a blow at my head: instinct, rather than the love of
life, made me parry it, and I got the stroke on my wrist.

I screamed, and at the same moment there was a tumult on deck, and the
ship quivered as if she too had been violently struck. Captain Eliot
rushed on deck, and began to give hurried orders. I could hear the first
officer contradict them, and then there was a heavy fall, and two or
three men stumbled down the cabin stairs, carrying some weight between
them.

_Later_. My husband is helpless, and Herbert has been with me, urging me
passionately to trust myself to him in a little boat at midnight. He
says there are several ships in sight, and one of them will be almost
sure to pick us up. He swears that he will leave me, and never see me
again (if I say so), so soon as he has placed me in safety, but he will
save me, by force if need be, from the brute into whose hands I fell so
innocently. If the ship does not see us, it is but dying, after all.

Good-bye, mother! I pray that this paper will reach you before Captain
Eliot can send you his own account, but if it does not, you will believe
me innocent all the same.

This was the last, and I folded up the papers as they had come to me.
That night I read them all to Pedro.

"They was drownded--I knew it," said Pedro; and nothing could remove
that opinion. A ghost is more convincing than logic.

Our voyage wore on, with one day just like another: my brother looked at
the sun every day, and put down a few cabalistic figures on a slate, but
his steady business was reading novels to his wife and drinking weak
claret and water.

The sea was always the same, smiling and smooth, and the "man at the
wheel" seemed to be always holding us back by main strength from the
place where we wanted to go. I had a growing belief that we should sail
for ever on this rippling mirror and never touch the frame of it. It
struck me with a sense of intense surprise when a dark line loomed far
ahead, and they told me quietly that that line meant Bombay.

It seemed a matter of course to my brother that the desired port should
heave in sight just when he expected it, but to me the efforts that he
had made to accomplish this tremendou