r to restore his belief, to teach him that his
fellow-creatures were in the main animated with the most excellent
motives, and to drive away all those strange, wild opinions of his, and
generally brighten and sweeten his life and turn him out a new man. She
could not have explained how she was going to accomplish all this, but
every maiden is at heart a missionary of some sort, and Lucy had a vague
idea that the influence of a good woman was always effective in such
cases. She never imagined that the youth would test her pretty, heartfelt
opinions and her glowing faith in the rightness of things in the cold,
sceptical light of his logic.

'Women don't bother themselves much to know if things are true,' he said.
'They're content with thinking they ought to be true.'

'Well,' she answered, 'why not try to be true to the things that ought to
be true?'

'If I wanted to, the world wouldn't let me.'

'You cannot believe that. The really good man is always obeyed and
reverenced.'

'And has always a fat billet. Yes; that kind of goodness is an excellent
thing as a speculation.'

She thought him wilfully paradoxical, and it came about, when their
acquaintanceship was about three weeks old, that while Jim Done, the
small and early philosopher, held Lucy in fine disdain as a born fool,
his vital humanity discovered strange allurements in her, and her
proximity fired a craving in his blood that sometimes tempted him to
crush her in his arms and bruise her lips with kisses. He grew less
brusque with her, and showed on occasions a sort of diffident gentleness,
and then Lucy was satisfied that her work was progressing.

'You never talk of your life there in England,' she said one night as
they stood by the mizzen-chains overlooking the sea. Since the use of the
forepart of the ship had been offered him as a privilege, Done
religiously abstained from encroaching a foot beyond the steerage limit,
although he had previously invaded the sacred reserve on occasion in
defiance of authority.

'No,' he said; 'I am running away from that.'

He gave little thought to the conversation, but he was thinking much of
the girl. She looked strangely beautiful and unreal in the dim
light--curiously visionary--and yet he felt that she radiated warmth and
life. Something stirred hotly within him: he was drawn to her as with
many hands.

'It would interest me,' she said--'it would interest me deeply.' She
turned her face up to him, and her ey