ld ripple and flash, and we would learn where we were. A day of
clear weather might follow, or three days or four, and then the fog would
settle down upon us, seemingly thicker than ever.

The hunting was perilous; yet the boats, lowered day after day, were
swallowed up in the grey obscurity, and were seen no more till nightfall,
and often not till long after, when they would creep in like sea-wraiths,
one by one, out of the grey. Wainwright--the hunter whom Wolf Larsen had
stolen with boat and men--took advantage of the veiled sea and escaped.
He disappeared one morning in the encircling fog with his two men, and we
never saw them again, though it was not many days when we learned that
they had passed from schooner to schooner until they finally regained
their own.

This was the thing I had set my mind upon doing, but the opportunity
never offered. It was not in the mate's province to go out in the boats,
and though I manoeuvred cunningly for it, Wolf Larsen never granted me
the privilege. Had he done so, I should have managed somehow to carry
Miss Brewster away with me. As it was, the situation was approaching a
stage which I was afraid to consider. I involuntarily shunned the
thought of it, and yet the thought continually arose in my mind like a
haunting spectre.

I had read sea-romances in my time, wherein figured, as a matter of
course, the lone woman in the midst of a shipload of men; but I learned,
now, that I had never comprehended the deeper significance of such a
situation--the thing the writers harped upon and exploited so thoroughly.
And here it was, now, and I was face to face with it. That it should be
as vital as possible, it required no more than that the woman should be
Maud Brewster, who now charmed me in person as she had long charmed me
through her work.

No one more out of environment could be imagined. She was a delicate,
ethereal creature, swaying and willowy, light and graceful of movement.
It never seemed to me that she walked, or, at least, walked after the
ordinary manner of mortals. Hers was an extreme lithesomeness, and she
moved with a certain indefinable airiness, approaching one as down might
float or as a bird on noiseless wings.

She was like a bit of Dresden china, and I was continually impressed with
what I may call her fragility. As at the time I caught her arm when
helping her below, so at any time I was quite prepared, should stress or
rough handling befall her, to s