‘At present, I have nothing to tell; but an hour may come when I shall have to depend very largely upon your judgment and your spirit also.’
She met my eyes with a firm, full, glowing gaze. ‘No matter what task you assign to me,’ she cried with vehemence, ‘you will find me equal to it. This life is insupportable; and I would choose at this instant the chance of death side by side with the chance of escape, sooner than continue as I am in this horrible condition of uncertainty, banishment, and misery.’
‘That may be the spirit I shall want to evoke,’ I said, smiling, whilst I held open her cabin door. ‘Good-night, Miss Temple.’
She held my hand a moment or two before relinquishing it. ‘I hope I have said nothing to vex you, Mr. Dugdale?’ she exclaimed, slightly inclining her fine head into a posture that might make one think of a princess expressing an apology.
‘What have I said that you should think so?’ I answered.
‘Your manner is a little hard,’ she exclaimed in a low voice.
‘God forgive me if it be so,’ said I. ‘Not to you, Miss Temple, would I be hard.’
My voice trembled as I pronounced these words, and abruptly I caught up her hand and pressed her fingers to my lips, and bowing, closed the door upon her and entered my own berth.
CHAPTER XXXVII
CAPE HORN
It was on one of the closing days of the month of December that my longitude being then some three leagues east of the easternmost of the Falkland Islands, and my latitude some fifty-five degrees south, that I brought the barque’s head to a west-south-west course for the rounding of Cape Horn. It was happily the summer season in those parts—their midsummer, indeed—and I was glad to believe that the horrors of this passage would be mitigated by a sun that in the month of June shines for scarcely six hours in the day over the ice-laden surge of this, the most inhospitable, the most bitterly dreary tract of waters upon the face of the world.