e towered an awful mature, white female with rapacious nostrils and a
cheaply ill-omened stare in her enormous eyes. She was disguised in some
semi-oriental, vulgar, fancy costume. She resembled a low-class medium
or one of those women who tell fortunes by cards for half a crown. And
yet she was striking. A professional sorceress from the slums. It was
incomprehensible. There was something awful in the thought that she was
the last reflection of the world of passion for the fierce soul which
seemed to look at one out of the sardonically savage face of that
old seaman. However, I noticed that she was holding some musical
instrument--guitar or mandoline--in her hand. Perhaps that was the secret
of her sortilege.

For Mr. Burns that photograph explained why the unloaded ship had kept
sweltering at anchor for three weeks in a pestilential hot harbour
without air. They lay there and gasped. The captain, appearing now and
then on short visits, mumbled to Mr. Burns unlikely tales about some
letters he was waiting for.

Suddenly, after vanishing for a week, he came on board in the middle
of the night and took the ship out to sea with the first break of dawn.
Daylight showed him looking wild and ill. The mere getting clear of the
land took two days, and somehow or other they bumped slightly on a
reef. However, no leak developed, and the captain, growling "no matter,"
informed Mr. Burns that he had made up his mind to take the ship to
Hong-Kong and drydock her there.

At this Mr. Burns was plunged into despair. For indeed, to beat up
to Hong-Kong against a fierce monsoon, with a ship not sufficiently
ballasted and with her supply of water not completed, was an insane
project.

But the captain growled peremptorily, "Stick her at it," and Mr. Burns,
dismayed and enraged, stuck her at it, and kept her at it, blowing away
sails, straining the spars, exhausting the crew--nearly maddened by the
absolute conviction that the attempt was impossible and was bound to end
in some catastrophe.

Meantime the captain, shut up in his cabin and wedged in a corner of his
settee against the crazy bounding of the ship, played the violin--or, at
any rate, made continuous noise on it.

When he appeared on deck he would not speak and not always answer when
spoken to. It was obvious that he was ill in some mysterious manner, and
beginning to break up.

As the days went by the sounds of the violin became less and less loud,
till at last only a f