'I came for my health and it seems I have come to die.'
'Has your health improved?'
'Yes—perhaps; I don't feel whilst I talk as if the voyage had done me much good.'
'You'll write an account of these experiences when you return, and the Queen will send for you that she may see and converse with as wonderful a heroine as ever flourished in her reign.'
'What have I done to be a heroine?'
I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and turned to lift the tumbler of grog that was yet half full; when my hand was arrested as though paralysed by an extraordinary noise, smooth, fierce, seething. I listened a moment, then sprang to the companion steps.