Day broke, grey and chill. The boat was close-hauled on a fresh breezeand the compass indicated that we were just making the course which wouldbring us to Japan. Though stoutly mittened, my fingers were cold, andthey pained from the grip on the steering-oar. My feet were stingingfrom the bite of the frost, and I hoped fervently that the sun wouldshine.

Before me, in the bottom of the boat, lay Maud. She, at least, was warm,for under her and over her were thick blankets. The top one I had drawnover her face to shelter it from the night, so I could see nothing butthe vague shape of her, and her light-brown hair, escaped from thecovering and jewelled with moisture from the air.

Long I looked at her, dwelling upon that one visible bit of her as only aman would who deemed it the most precious thing in the world. Soinsistent was my gaze that at last she stirred under the blankets, thetop fold was thrown back and she smiled out on me, her eyes yet heavywith sleep.

“Good-morning, Mr. Van Weyden,” she said. “Have you sighted land yet?”

“No,” I answered, “but we are approaching it at a rate of six miles anhour.”

She made a _mouè_ of disappointment.

“But that is equivalent to one hundred and forty-four miles intwenty-four hours,” I added reassuringly.

Her face brightened. “And how far have we to go?”

“Siberia lies off there,” I said, pointing to the west. “But to thesouth-west, some six hundred miles, is Japan. If this wind should hold,we’ll make it in five days.”

“And if it storms? The boat could not live?”

She had a way of looking one in the eyes and demanding the truth, andthus she looked at me as she asked the question.

“It would have to storm very hard,” I temporized.

“And if it storms very hard?”

I nodded my head. “But we may be picked up any moment by asealing-schooner. They are plentifully distributed over this part of theocean.”

“Why, you are chilled through!” she cried. “Look! You are shivering.Don’t deny it; you are. And here I have been lying warm as toast.”

“I don’t see that it would help matters if you, too, sat up and werechilled,” I laughed.

“It will, though, when I learn to steer, which I certainly shall.”

She sat up and began making her simple toilet. She shook down her hair,and it fell about her in a brown cloud, hiding her face and shoulders.Dear, damp brown hair! I wanted to kiss it, to ripple it through myfingers, to bury my face in it. I gazed entranced, till the boat raninto the wind and the flapping sail warned me I was not attending to myduties. Idealist and romanticist that I was and always had been in spiteof my analytical nature, yet I had failed till now in grasping much ofthe physical characteristics of love. The love of man and woman, I hadalways held, was a sublimated something related to spirit, a spiritualbond that linked and drew their souls together. The bonds of the fleshhad little part in my cosmos of love. But I was learning the sweetlesson for myself that the soul transmuted itself, expressed itself,through the flesh; that the sight and sense and touch of the loved one’shair was as much breath and voice and essence of the spirit as the lightthat shone from the eyes and the thoughts that fell from the lips. Afterall, pure spirit was unknowable, a thing to be sensed and divined only;nor could it express itself in terms of itself. Jehovah wasanthropomorphic because he could address himself to the Jews only interms of their understanding; so he was conceived as in their own image,as a cloud, a pillar of fire, a tangible, physical something which themind of the Israelites could grasp.

And so I gazed upon Maud’s light-brown hair, and loved it, and learnedmore of love than all the poets and singers had taught me with all theirsongs and sonnets. She flung it back with a sudden adroit movement, andher face emerged, smiling.

“Why don’t women wear their hair down always?” I asked. “It is so muchmore beautiful.”

“If it didn’t tangle so dreadfully,” she laughed. “There! I’ve lost oneof my precious hair-pins!”

I neglected the boat and had the sail spilling the wind again and again,such was my delight in following her every movement as she searchedthrough the blankets for the pin. I was surprised, and joyfully, thatshe was so much the woman, and the display of each trait and mannerismthat was characteristically feminine gave me keener joy. For I had beenelevating her too highly in my concepts of her, removing her too far fromthe plane of the human, and too far from me. I had been making of her acreature goddess-like and unapproachable. So I hailed with delight thelittle traits that proclaimed her only woman after all, such as the tossof the head which flung back the cloud of hair, and the search for thepin. She was woman, my kind, on my plane, and the delightful intimacy ofkind, of man and woman, was possible, as well as the reverence and awe inwhich I knew I should always hold her.

She found the pin with an adorable little cry, and I turned my attentionmore fully to my steering. I proceeded to experiment, lashing andwedging the steering-oar until the boat held on fairly well by the windwithout my assistance. Occasionally it came up too close, or fell offtoo freely; but it always recovered itself and in the main behavedsatisfactorily.

“And now we shall have breakfast,” I said. “But first you must be morewarmly clad.”

I got out a heavy shirt, new from the slop-chest and made from blanketgoods. I knew the kind, so thick and so close of texture that it couldresist the rain and not be soaked through after hours of wetting. Whenshe had slipped this on over her head, I exchanged the boy’s cap she worefor a man’s cap, large enough to cover her hair, and, when the flap wasturned down, to completely cover her neck and ears. The effect wascharming. Her face was of the sort that cannot but look well under allcircumstances. Nothing could destroy its exquisite oval, its well-nighclassic lines, its delicately stencilled brows, its large brown eyes,clear-seeing and calm, gloriously calm.

A puff, slightly stronger than usual, struck us just then. The boat wascaught as it obliquely crossed the crest of a wave. It went oversuddenly, burying its gunwale level with the sea and shipping a bucketfulor so of water. I was opening a can of tongue at the moment, and Isprang to the sheet and cast it off just in time. The sail flapped andfluttered, and the boat paid off. A few minutes of regulating sufficedto put it on its course again, when I returned to the preparation ofbreakfast.

“It does very well, it seems, though I am not versed in things nautical,”she said, nodding her head with grave approval at my steeringcontrivance.

“But it will serve only when we are sailing by the wind,” I explained.“When running more freely, with the wind astern abeam, or on the quarter,it will be necessary for me to steer.”

“I must say I don’t understand your technicalities,” she said, “but I doyour conclusion, and I don’t like it. You cannot steer night and day andfor ever. So I shall expect, after breakfast, to receive my firstlesson. And then you shall lie down and sleep. We’ll stand watches justas they do on ships.”

“I don’t see how I am to teach you,” I made protest. “I am just learningfor myself. You little thought when you trusted yourself to me that Ihad had no experience whatever with small boats. This is the first timeI have ever been in one.”

“Then we’ll learn together, sir. And since you’ve had a night’s startyou shall teach me what you have learned. And now, breakfast. My! thisair does give one an appetite!”

“No coffee,” I said regretfully, passing her buttered sea-biscuits and aslice of canned tongue. “And there will be no tea, no soups, nothinghot, till we have made land somewhere, somehow.”

After the simple breakfast, capped with a cup of cold water, Maud tookher lesson in steering. In teaching her I learned quite a deal myself,though I was applying the knowledge already acquired by sailing the_Ghost_ and by watching the boat-steerers sail the small boats. She wasan apt pupil, and soon learned to keep the course, to luff in the puffsand to cast off the sheet in an emergency.

Having grown tired, apparently, of the task, she relinquished the oar tome. I had folded up the blankets, but she now proceeded to spread themout on the bottom. When all was arranged snugly, she said:

“Now, sir, to bed. And you shall sleep until luncheon. Tilldinner-time,” she corrected, remembering the arrangement on the _Ghost_.

What could I do? She insisted, and said, “Please, please,” whereupon Iturned the oar over to her and obeyed. I experienced a positive sensuousdelight as I crawled into the bed she had made with her hands. The calmand control which were so much a part of her seemed to have beencommunicated to the blankets, so that I was aware of a soft dreaminessand content, and of an oval face and brown eyes framed in a fisherman’scap and tossing against a background now of grey cloud, now of grey sea,and then I was aware that I had been asleep.

I looked at my watch. It was one o’clock. I had slept seven hours! Andshe had been steering seven hours! When I took the steering-oar I hadfirst to unbend her cramped fingers. Her modicum of strength had beenexhausted, and she was unable even to move from her position. I wascompelled to let go the sheet while I helped her to the nest of blanketsand chafed her hands and arms.

“I am so tired,” she said, with a quick intake of the breath and a sigh,drooping her head wearily.

But she straightened it the next moment. “Now don’t scold, don’t youdare scold,” she cried with mock defiance.

“I hope my face does not appear angry,” I answered seriously; “for Iassure you I am not in the least angry.”

“N-no,” she considered. “It looks only reproachful.”

“Then it is an honest face, for it looks what I feel. You were not fairto yourself, nor to me. How can I ever trust you again?”

She looked penitent. “I’ll be good,” she said, as a naughty child mightsay it. “I promise—”

“To obey as a sailor would obey his captain?”

“Yes,” she answered. “It was stupid of me, I know.”

“Then you must promise something else,” I ventured.

“Readily.”

“That you will not say, ‘Please, please,’ too often; for when you do youare sure to override my authority.”

She laughed with amused appreciation. She, too, had noticed the power ofthe repeated “please.”

“It is a good word—” I began.

“But I must not overwork it,” she broke in.

But she laughed weakly, and her head drooped again. I left the oar longenough to tuck the blankets about her feet and to pull a single foldacross her face. Alas! she was not strong. I looked with misgivingtoward the south-west and thought of the six hundred miles of hardshipbefore us—ay, if it were no worse than hardship. On this sea a stormmight blow up at any moment and destroy us. And yet I was unafraid. Iwas without confidence in the future, extremely doubtful, and yet I feltno underlying fear. It must come right, it must come right, I repeatedto myself, over and over again.

The wind freshened in the afternoon, raising a stiffer sea and trying theboat and me severely. But the supply of food and the nine breakers ofwater enabled the boat to stand up to the sea and wind, and I held on aslong as I dared. Then I removed the sprit, tightly hauling down the peakof the sail, and we raced along under what sailors call a leg-of-mutton.

Late in the afternoon I sighted a steamer’s smoke on the horizon toleeward, and I knew it either for a Russian cruiser, or, more likely, the_Macedonia_ still seeking the _Ghost_. The sun had not shone all day,and it had been bitter cold. As night drew on, the clouds darkened andthe wind freshened, so that when Maud and I ate supper it was with ourmittens on and with me still steering and eating morsels between puffs.

By the time it was dark, wind and sea had become too strong for the boat,and I reluctantly took in the sail and set about making a drag orsea-anchor. I had learned of the device from the talk of the hunters,and it was a simple thing to manufacture. Furling the sail and lashingit securely about the mast, boom, sprit, and two pairs of spare oars, Ithrew it overboard. A line connected it with the bow, and as it floatedlow in the water, practically unexposed to the wind, it drifted lessrapidly than the boat. In consequence it held the boat bow on to the seaand wind—the safest position in which to escape being swamped when thesea is breaking into whitecaps.

“And now?” Maud asked cheerfully, when the task was accomplished and Ipulled on my mittens.

“And now we are no longer travelling toward Japan,” I answered. “Ourdrift is to the south-east, or south-south-east, at the rate of at leasttwo miles an hour.”

“That will be only twenty-four miles,” she urged, “if the wind remainshigh all night.”

“Yes, and only one hundred and forty miles if it continues for three daysand nights.”

“But it won’t continue,” she said with easy confidence. “It will turnaround and blow fair.”

“The sea is the great faithless one.”

“But the wind!” she retorted. “I have heard you grow eloquent over thebrave trade-wind.”

“I wish I had thought to bring Wolf Larsen’s chronometer and sextant,” Isaid, still gloomily. “Sailing one direction, drifting anotherdirection, to say nothing of the set of the current in some thirddirection, makes a resultant which dead reckoning can never calculate.Before long we won’t know where we are by five hundred miles.”

Then I begged her pardon and promised I should not be disheartened anymore. At her solicitation I let her take the watch till midnight,—it wasthen nine o’clock, but I wrapped her in blankets and put an oilskin abouther before I lay down. I slept only cat-naps. The boat was leaping andpounding as it fell over the crests, I could hear the seas rushing past,and spray was continually being thrown aboard. And still, it was not abad night, I mused—nothing to the nights I had been through on the_Ghost_; nothing, perhaps, to the nights we should go through in thiscockle-shell. Its planking was three-quarters of an inch thick. Betweenus and the bottom of the sea was less than an inch of wood.

And yet, I aver it, and I aver it again, I was unafraid. The death whichWolf Larsen and even Thomas Mugridge had made me fear, I no longerfeared. The coming of Maud Brewster into my life seemed to havetransformed me. After all, I thought, it is better and finer to lovethan to be loved, if it makes something in life so worth while that oneis not loath to die for it. I forget my own life in the love of anotherlife; and yet, such is the paradox, I never wanted so much to live asright now when I place the least value upon my own life. I never had somuch reason for living, was my concluding thought; and after that, untilI dozed, I contented myself with trying to pierce the darkness to where Iknew Maud crouched low in the stern-sheets, watchful of the foaming seaand ready to call me on an instant’s notice.