that seemed cut out of night and never ending, the sea, like an
obsession, crawling shoreward, and Raft carrying her on his shoulder.

They saw the summit where she had stood looking towards the west and the
hopeless prospect of finding a bay that might not be there and an
anchorage where there might be a ship, on a coast where few ships ever
came.

Fascinated and warmed by Perrier Jouet, they followed her to the place
where the wind had brought her the smell of the try pots and to the
cliff edge where Derision shew her the Chinese whaler and the terrible
little man, blood-stained, and busy with butchery.

She shewed them the great serang--Captain of the Chinese--driving them
off the beach and telling them to begone back into the wilderness, and,
vaguely, the fight where Raft had saved her from death or worse----

"Ah, Mon Dieu, what a man," cried a female voice down the table.

Cleo stopped.

"Yes, Madame la Comtesse," said she, "but a man beyond the pale, a man
to be ashamed of, a man who, were he to sit in the lounge of this hotel
and smoke his pipe, would drive all the other guests away. A common
sailor. A man rough from the sea and illiterate."

There was a dead silence.

Monsieur Bonvalot, a socialist, though a business man, nodded his head.
He broke the silence.

"A man," said Monsieur Bonvalot, "is, after all, a man."

"Oh, no, monsieur, he is not," said Cleo, "not in Marseilles. But do
not think I am quarrelling with social conditions. There must, I
believe, always be hewers of wood and drawers of water. I am just
talking of Raft and my own position as regards him. I am not thinking of
the fact that he saved my life time and again, or that he nursed me with
his great rough hands as tenderly as a mother. I am thinking of the fact
that I have discovered something quite new and genuine, a human heart
that is warm and real and true and simple, simple as the heart of a
child, a mind that has no crookedness, a man who, in Paris or here in
Marseilles, is absurd, not because he is rough and uncouth, but because
he is like Monsieur Gulliver amongst the little people. I have seen the
great, I have seen the wind and the sun and the sea and the mountains as
they really are, and life as it really is, for those who really live. I
have seen death, none of you here have ever seen or imagined death, none
of you here have ever seen life, none of you here have seen the world.
You all have been protected from the truth