She looked up at him with startled eyes, and his own were large and full of trouble. They were going through Kirk Michael by the house of the Deemster, who was ill, and both drew rein and went slowly. Some acacias in the garden slashed their broadswords in the night air, and a windmill behind stood out against the moon like a gigantic bat. The black shadow of the horses stepped beside them.
“Are you feeling lonely to-night, Philip?”
“I'm feeling——”
“Yes?”
“I'm feeling as if the dead and the living, the living and the dead—oh, Kate, Kate, I don't know what I'm feeling.”
She put her hand caressingly on the top of his hand. “Never mind, dear,” she said softly; “I'll stand by you. You shan't be alone.”
XVIII.
It was midday, then, on the tropic seas, and the horizon was closing in with clouds as of blood and vapours of stifling heat. A steamship was rolling in a heavy swell, under winds that were as hot as gusts from an open furnace. Under its decks a man lay in an atmosphere of fever and the sickening odour of bandages and stale air. Above the throb of the engines and the rattle of the rudder chain he heard a step going by his open door, and he called in a feeble voice that was cheerful and almost merry, but yet the voice of a homesick boy—
“How many days from home, engineer?”