He was keenly distressed by the mental picture of Nahnya sitting alone, fighting sleep, and awaiting the approach of danger. He got up without having a very clear idea of what he meant to do—except that she must be reassured. He crossed the plank to the boat's deck. He knew he could not open either of the two closed doors without causing a screech sufficient to awaken the entire party, but he found that the door on the river side was still open, for he could see the rays of light streaming out on the dusty surface of the water. There was a narrow deck all the way around outside the house. He made for the open doorway, but stopped before showing himself. Ralph had conceived a respect for the resources of this inexplicable girl. One could never be sure in advance of what she might do.
"Hello!" he said softly. "It's the doctor."
There was no answer.
With a fast-beating heart he looked in. She was sleeping on the deck in the middle of an open space between the piles of freight forward and the boiler aft. To a beam over her head she had fastened the engineer's lantern, and Ralph, instantly comprehending, had to approve both her courage and her good sense. The light was her safeguard.
She had spread a piece of canvas on the deck, and lay wrapped in a gray blanket, her head pillowed on her outflung arm. Her face, slightly turned up, was revealed under the light, calm and partly smiling in sleep. The hard, watchful look that had so often nonplussed him during the day had disappeared. Once again he was compelled to rearrange all his impressions of her.
"She's only a kid!" he thought tenderly. He had not presumed to take the protective attitude toward her before.
Her long, curved lashes swept her dusky cheeks; her lips were a little parted as if in expectation; the hand that was flung out toward him lay palm upward, the fingers bent, as if mutely asking for a comrade hand. Abandoned to sleep as she lay, there was something at once appealing and holy in her aspect: something that made his whole being yearn over her, and that caused him to draw back outside the door.
He could not bear to look at her. A feeling he could not have named made him return to the forward deck. He turned up his face to the night sky, and let his heart quiet down. The essence of the poetry of womanhood had been shown to him, and the starry night thrilled with the wonder of it. In a flash there was revealed to him a new understanding of all the love-poems he had ever read, and perhaps secretly despised.
"She sleeps like a lily on the water," he murmured to himself without the least shame.
By and by, prose reasserting itself, he began to reflect upon what he should do next. "If I go back to the fire I'll surely fall asleep," he thought. "But if I lie down here nobody can disturb her without waking me first."