"You thought nothing of doing it for me. You have done everything for me and with a tenderness that I can remember only as part of my mother. You are so tender and again you are so harsh—as hard and cold as steel."
"The sea makes one harsh——" He could not control his voice and he stopped short in fear of whither he might be led. He noticed then for the first time that Emily's skirt was clinging to her damply. "Do please go below and get into some fresh, dry clothing. The thought that you are looking out for yourself will help me to sleep. Do try to lie down, too."
"If there is nothing more I can do here I will go," she said obediently. "But it is a strange thing: With all the wetting I have undergone I have not the sign of a cold."
"Salt water ought to have at least one virtue," he answered. As he spoke he nodded for her to go below.
Paul Lavelle slept only for a few minutes at a time, if he really slept at all during the next couple of hours. He heard the gold woman descend the companionway and he followed her footsteps through the cabin. Even when all was quiet below and he knew that Emily must be lying down wakefulness rode his brain. He could see the future stretching away in loneliness without this woman in his life, and for the first time in all the suffering he had known he thought of a way out. In his blackest hours of the past ten years this had never occurred to him. To fight on to the end without cease, with never a let-up in the drive, had been the ruling impulse of his spirit. To fight on now in silence and give life to this precious woman; to stand up manfully no matter what the odds, with his whole soul in the battle, until he should bring her to safety—this was the one course. After that there would be a way if it were denied him that he should not suffer death in the giving of life to her. A gnawing pain in his left hand finally drew his attention to it. He saw that the green jade ring which he had worn constantly since leaving Yokohama was choking the finger which it encircled. He sat up to take it off, and as he did so he was startled to hear a strange heavy footfall in the cabin. He was on the point of trying to rise when Emily came up through the companionway. It was her footfall that had alarmed him. As her head and shoulders rose above the teakwood rail around the staircase, the sun, now far down in the west, shot a golden beam through the port over Paul's berth. It touched her head with the fire of a divine beauty.
"Oh, I woke you," she whispered tremulously, and at the same time she sensed his depression of spirit.
"No, I was awake," was all he could say for the moment. It came from his lips in a barely audible voice.
To be loved by and by love to possess a woman like this—the world, aye a thousand worlds—were well lost! That was the thought which excluded everything else from his mind.
The glow of a sleep which had refreshed and restored lingered in the cheeks of the gold woman and in the tips of her shelly ears. Her mouth was retouched with its natural delicate scarlet. Her sensitive nostrils quivered at the sunlight's touch. Her blue-shirted bosom, heaving ever so slightly from the exertion of climbing the companionway, moved the loose plaits of her hair hanging over her shoulders like ropes of molten gold. Hardship had drawn her features only slightly. Youth's capacity of quick recovery was hers. Physically she was little changed, but there was a subtle difference in her. Her whole being now seemed to breathe: "I have no doubt of life."
"I've changed and slept," she said as Paul's glance swept her. "I feel as if there had never been a storm."