hen I could have married her comfortably and
respectably, freed from all obligations of ladders, dark lanterns,
tempests, and whatever was next to come? I could have beaten my head
upon the table. Never did I better understand what I have always
regarded as a stroke of fiction--I mean the disposition of a man in a
passion to tear out his hair by the roots.

At the expiration, as I supposed, of twenty minutes, the hatch cover
was opened, this time without any following screech and blast of wind,
and Caudel descended. Had he been a beam of sunshine he could not have
been more welcome to my eyes. He was clad from head to foot in
oilskins, from which the wet ran as from an umbrella in a
thunder-shower, and the skin and hue of his face resembled soaked
leather.

"Well, Mr. Barclay, sir," he exclaimed, "and how have you been getting
on? It's been a bad job; but there's nothen to alarm ye, I'm sure."
Then catching sight of Grace's face, he cried, "The young lady ain't
been and hurt herself, I hope, sir?"

"Her fear and this movement," I answered, "have proved too much for
her. I wish you would pull off your oilskins and help me to convey her
to the lee side there. The edge of this table seems to be cutting me
in halves," the fact being that I was to windward with the whole weight
of my sweetheart, who rested lifelessly against me to increase the
pressure, so that at every leeward stoop of the craft my breast was
caught by the edge of the table with a sensation as of a knife cutting
through my shirt.

He instantly whipped off his streaming waterproofs, standing without
the least inconvenience whilst the decks slanted under him like a
see-saw, and in a very few moments he had safely placed Grace on the
lee locker with her head on a pillow. I made shift to get round to her
without hurting myself, then cried to Caudel to sit and tell me what
had happened.

"Well, it's just this, sir," he answered, "the mast has carried away
some feet below the head of it. It went on a sudden in the squall in
which the wind burst down upon us. Perhaps it was as well it happened,
for she lay down to that there houtfly in a way so hobstinate that I
did believe she'd never lift herself out of the water agin. But the
sail came down when the mast broke, and I managed to get her afore it,
though I don't mind owning to you now, sir, that what with the gear
fouling the helm, and what with other matters which there ain't no call
for me to