With a laugh and those snatches of the old chanty of "Leave Her, Johnny" ringing from his lips in a clear, deep voice Paul led the way out on deck.
"Great old song that. Ought to hear a gang of bullies at it."
"It must be fine," she managed to say with a pretense of enjoyment.
He turned from her and went forward to the standard compass. Going and returning, he looked aloft and around at the silent plain of brine. The sails still drooped in idleness. There was the barest heave in the ocean. The bark was without steerage way.
"Better lie down and take a nap," Paul said as he came back and stood at the wheel for a second. "Can't tell how long this calm will last. I'm going to try to steal a little sleep."
"Please do. I will lie down presently."
He did not meet her gaze, and she turned toward the sea as if she hoped its purple heart would give her throbbing one an answer. She heard Paul leave the poop and then a clang from the engine room told her he was there. It sounded like a door closing between them—a door that would never open again—and she went into the lounge to weep bitter tears which would not be stayed.
If she could have seen Paul Lavelle's face when he turned away from her and at the moment when she was giving way to her loneliness she would have understood that he was suffering, too.
After overhauling the fires under the donkey boiler, Paul threw himself at full length across the main hatch. He was mind weary; body weary; at war with himself. Staring up at the sky he brought his whole life in contemplation. Another day, as he had told the gold woman, might see them delivered from their peril in the Daphne. Anyway he felt that the world—the world in which she belonged and must have her being—was not very far off. And she would be going out of his life forever. She must. A pariah like him could not say to her, "Stay." The man who stood marked as he was could say to no woman, "Stay." All day the past had lashed him. All day the fineness of him had arraigned the weakness which had permitted him to forget that he could never claim her love. All day the memory of his madness in daring to kiss her as he had had tortured him. He groaned in his agony of spirit.
"God," he prayed aloud with lips strange to prayer, "grant that I may finish 'what remains before us of the course without dishonor to ourselves or hurt to others.' For my soul's sake I ask this."