She looked penitent. “I’ll be good,” she said, as a naughty child might say 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 you are sure to override my authority.”
She laughed with amused appreciation. She, too, had noticed the power of the 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 long enough to tuck the blankets about her feet and to pull a single fold across her face. Alas! she was not strong. I looked with misgiving toward the south-west and thought of the six hundred miles of hardship before us—ay, if it were no worse than hardship. On this sea a storm might blow up at any moment and destroy us. And yet I was unafraid. I was without confidence in the future, extremely doubtful, and yet I felt no underlying fear. It must come right, it must come right, I repeated to myself, over and over again.