side was open. The
night was black, like a barrel of coal-tar. And then he heard a woman's
voice whispering to him.

"That confounded green-eyed girl of the Pamphilius people had put the
kids to bed a long time ago, of course, but it seems couldn't get to
sleep herself. She heard eight bells struck, and the chief mate come
below to turn in. She waited a bit, then got into her dressing-gown and
stole across the empty saloon and up the stairs into the chart-room. She
sat down on the settee near the open door to cool herself, I daresay.

"I suppose when she whispered to Wilmot it was as if somebody had struck
a match in the fellow's brain. I don't know how it was they had got so
very thick. I fancy he had met her ashore a few times before. I couldn't
make it out, because, when telling the story, Wilmot would break off to
swear something awful at every second word. We had met on the quay in
Sydney, and he had an apron of sacking up to his chin, a big whip in his
hand. A wagon-driver. Glad to do anything not to starve. That's what he
had come down to.

"However, there he was, with his head inside the door, on the girl's
shoulder as likely as not--officer of the watch! The helmsman, on giving
his evidence afterwards, said that he shouted several times that the
binnacle lamp had gone out. It didn't matter to him, because his orders
were to 'sail her close.' 'I thought it funny,' he said, 'that the ship
should keep on falling off in squalls, but I luffed her up every time
as close as I was able. It was so dark I couldn't see my hand before my
face, and the rain came in bucketfuls on my head.'

"The truth was that at every squall the wind hauled aft a little, till
gradually the ship came to be heading straight for the coast, without a
single soul in her being aware of it. Wilmot himself confessed that he
had not been near the standard compass for an hour. He might well have
confessed! The first thing he knew was the man on the look-out shouting
blue murder forward there.

"He tore his neck free, he says, and yelled back at him: 'What do you
say?'

"'I think I hear breakers ahead, sir,' howled the man, and came rushing
aft with the rest of the watch, in the 'awfullest blinding deluge that
ever fell from the sky,' Wilmot says. For a second or so he was so
scared and bewildered that he could not remember on which side of the
gulf the ship was. He wasn't a good officer, but he was a seaman all
the same. He pulled himself toge