"We are differently made, I suppose;—which is perhaps a good thing. He delights in finding things out there. I go out only for necessaries."
"What does he find—besides strange old clothes?"
"Oh, heaps of things—treasure. There are the cargoes of very many ships out there. They have been accumulating for hundreds of years, I suppose."
"And it does not attract you?"
"Not in the slightest."
"You are, perhaps, rich."
"I have enough, and I have my profession,—and little chance apparently of making any use of either."
"Ah..." and presently, "As to that, am I wrong then in thinking that if you had not been here I would most likely not have been here either?" and the wind and the sun had whipped a fine colour into her face.
"You would, perhaps, not be very far wrong."
"I remember it dimly, and in broken bits, like a horrible dream,—the crash, the terrible noise of the waves, the shouting and the screaming. It was the Captain himself who tied me to that mast when everything was going to pieces. And when the waves washed over me, and I felt myself slowly dying, I would have loosed myself if I could, to make an end. It was terrible to be so long of dying. And the cold of the sea!—oh, it was a horror," and she shivered again at the remembrance... "Then I died.... And then—long long afterwards—I found myself coming slowly back to life, and beginning to get warm again, with prickly pains like pins and needles all over me——"