Brave winds, blowing fair, swiftly drove the _Ghost_ northward into theseal herd. We encountered it well up to the forty-fourth parallel, in araw and stormy sea across which the wind harried the fog-banks in eternalflight. For days at a time we could never see the sun nor take anobservation; then the wind would sweep the face of the ocean clean, thewaves would ripple and flash, and we would learn where we were. A day ofclear weather might follow, or three days or four, and then the fog wouldsettle down upon us, seemingly thicker than ever.

The hunting was perilous; yet the boats, lowered day after day, wereswallowed 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 hadstolen 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 wenever saw them again, though it was not many days when we learned thatthey had passed from schooner to schooner until they finally regainedtheir own.

This was the thing I had set my mind upon doing, but the opportunitynever offered. It was not in the mate’s province to go out in the boats,and though I manœuvred cunningly for it, Wolf Larsen never granted me theprivilege. Had he done so, I should have managed somehow to carry MissBrewster away with me. As it was, the situation was approaching a stagewhich I was afraid to consider. I involuntarily shunned the thought ofit, and yet the thought continually arose in my mind like a hauntingspectre.

I had read sea-romances in my time, wherein figured, as a matter ofcourse, 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 asituation—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 beas vital as possible, it required no more than that the woman should beMaud Brewster, who now charmed me in person as she had long charmed methrough 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 theordinary manner of mortals. Hers was an extreme lithesomeness, and shemoved with a certain indefinable airiness, approaching one as down mightfloat or as a bird on noiseless wings.

She was like a bit of Dresden china, and I was continually impressed withwhat I may call her fragility. As at the time I caught her arm whenhelping her below, so at any time I was quite prepared, should stress orrough handling befall her, to see her crumble away. I have never seenbody and spirit in such perfect accord. Describe her verse, as thecritics have described it, as sublimated and spiritual, and you havedescribed her body. It seemed to partake of her soul, to have analogousattributes, and to link it to life with the slenderest of chains.Indeed, she trod the earth lightly, and in her constitution there waslittle of the robust clay.

She was in striking contrast to Wolf Larsen. Each was nothing that theother was, everything that the other was not. I noted them walking thedeck together one morning, and I likened them to the extreme ends of thehuman ladder of evolution—the one the culmination of all savagery, theother the finished product of the finest civilization. True, Wolf Larsenpossessed intellect to an unusual degree, but it was directed solely tothe exercise of his savage instincts and made him but the more formidablea savage. He was splendidly muscled, a heavy man, and though he strodewith the certitude and directness of the physical man, there was nothingheavy about his stride. The jungle and the wilderness lurked in theuplift and downput of his feet. He was cat-footed, and lithe, andstrong, always strong. I likened him to some great tiger, a beast ofprowess and prey. He looked it, and the piercing glitter that arose attimes in his eyes was the same piercing glitter I had observed in theeyes of caged leopards and other preying creatures of the wild.

But this day, as I noted them pacing up and down, I saw that it was shewho terminated the walk. They came up to where I was standing by theentrance to the companion-way. Though she betrayed it by no outwardsign, I felt, somehow, that she was greatly perturbed. She made someidle remark, looking at me, and laughed lightly enough; but I saw hereyes return to his, involuntarily, as though fascinated; then they fell,but not swiftly enough to veil the rush of terror that filled them.

It was in his eyes that I saw the cause of her perturbation. Ordinarilygrey and cold and harsh, they were now warm and soft and golden, and alla-dance with tiny lights that dimmed and faded, or welled up till thefull orbs were flooded with a glowing radiance. Perhaps it was to thisthat the golden colour was due; but golden his eyes were, enticing andmasterful, at the same time luring and compelling, and speaking a demandand clamour of the blood which no woman, much less Maud Brewster, couldmisunderstand.

Her own terror rushed upon me, and in that moment of fear—the mostterrible fear a man can experience—I knew that in inexpressible ways shewas dear to me. The knowledge that I loved her rushed upon me with theterror, and with both emotions gripping at my heart and causing my bloodat the same time to chill and to leap riotously, I felt myself drawn by apower without me and beyond me, and found my eyes returning against mywill to gaze into the eyes of Wolf Larsen. But he had recovered himself.The golden colour and the dancing lights were gone. Cold and grey andglittering they were as he bowed brusquely and turned away.

“I am afraid,” she whispered, with a shiver. “I am so afraid.”

I, too, was afraid, and what of my discovery of how much she meant to memy mind was in a turmoil; but, I succeeded in answering quite calmly:

“All will come right, Miss Brewster. Trust me, it will come right.”

She answered with a grateful little smile that sent my heart pounding,and started to descend the companion-stairs.

For a long while I remained standing where she had left me. There wasimperative need to adjust myself, to consider the significance of thechanged aspect of things. It had come, at last, love had come, when Ileast expected it and under the most forbidding conditions. Of course,my philosophy had always recognized the inevitableness of the love-callsooner or later; but long years of bookish silence had made meinattentive and unprepared.

And now it had come! Maud Brewster! My memory flashed back to thatfirst thin little volume on my desk, and I saw before me, as though inthe concrete, the row of thin little volumes on my library shelf. How Ihad welcomed each of them! Each year one had come from the press, and tome each was the advent of the year. They had voiced a kindred intellectand spirit, and as such I had received them into a camaraderie of themind; but now their place was in my heart.

My heart? A revulsion of feeling came over me. I seemed to standoutside myself and to look at myself incredulously. Maud Brewster!Humphrey Van Weyden, “the cold-blooded fish,” the “emotionless monster,”the “analytical demon,” of Charley Furuseth’s christening, in love! Andthen, without rhyme or reason, all sceptical, my mind flew back to asmall biographical note in the red-bound _Who’s Who_, and I said tomyself, “She was born in Cambridge, and she is twenty-seven years old.”And then I said, “Twenty-seven years old and still free and fancy free?”But how did I know she was fancy free? And the pang of new-born jealousyput all incredulity to flight. There was no doubt about it. I wasjealous; therefore I loved. And the woman I loved was Maud Brewster.

I, Humphrey Van Weyden, was in love! And again the doubt assailed me.Not that I was afraid of it, however, or reluctant to meet it. On thecontrary, idealist that I was to the most pronounced degree, myphilosophy had always recognized and guerdoned love as the greatest thingin the world, the aim and the summit of being, the most exquisite pitchof joy and happiness to which life could thrill, the thing of all thingsto be hailed and welcomed and taken into the heart. But now that it hadcome I could not believe. I could not be so fortunate. It was too good,too good to be true. Symons’s lines came into my head:

“I wandered all these years among A world of women, seeking you.”

And then I had ceased seeking. It was not for me, this greatest thing inthe world, I had decided. Furuseth was right; I was abnormal, an“emotionless monster,” a strange bookish creature, capable of pleasuringin sensations only of the mind. And though I had been surrounded bywomen all my days, my appreciation of them had been æsthetic and nothingmore. I had actually, at times, considered myself outside the pale, amonkish fellow denied the eternal or the passing passions I saw andunderstood so well in others. And now it had come! Undreamed of andunheralded, it had come. In what could have been no less than anecstasy, I left my post at the head of the companion-way and startedalong the deck, murmuring to myself those beautiful lines of Mrs.Browning:

“I lived with visions for my company Instead of men and women years ago, And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know A sweeter music than they played to me.”

But the sweeter music was playing in my ears, and I was blind andoblivious to all about me. The sharp voice of Wolf Larsen aroused me.

“What the hell are you up to?” he was demanding.

I had strayed forward where the sailors were painting, and I came tomyself to find my advancing foot on the verge of overturning a paint-pot.

“Sleep-walking, sunstroke,—what?” he barked.

“No; indigestion,” I retorted, and continued my walk as if nothinguntoward had occurred.