"Oh, he does, does he?" said the Red Cross young man. "Well, you'd
better wait six months before you fall too hard for him. He may get his
face changed, and there isn't much behind it."

He spoke quite savagely, and both Tish and I felt that he was making a
mistake, and that gentleness, with just a suggestion of the caveman
beneath, would have been more efficacious. Indeed when we knew Mr.
Burton better--that was his name--we ventured the suggestion, but he
only shook his head.

"You don't know her," he said. "She is the sort of girl who likes to
take the soft-spoken fellow and make him savage. And when she gets the
cave type she wants to tame him. I've tried being both, so I know. I'm
damned--I beg your pardon--I'm cursed if I know why I care for her. I
suppose it's because she has about as much use for me as she has for a
dose of Paris green. But if you hear of that Weber who hangs round her
going overboard some night, I hope you'll understand. That's all."

That conversation, however, was later on in the voyage. That first night
out Tish saw the captain and he finally agreed, if we said nothing about
it, to have a sailor's hammock hung in Aggie's cabin.

"It wouldn't do to have it get about, madam," he said. "You know how it
is--I'd have all the passengers in hammocks in twenty-four hours, and
the crew sleeping on the decks. And you know crews are touchy these
days, what with submarines and chaplains and young shave-tails of
officers who expect to be kissed every time they're asked to get off a
coil of rope."

We promised secrecy, and that evening a hammock was hung in Aggie's
cabin. It was not much like a hammock, however, and it was so high that
Tish said it looked more like a chandelier than anything else. Getting
Aggie into it required the steward, the stewardess, Mr. Burton and
ourselves, but it was finally done, and we all felt easier at once,
except that I was obliged to stand on a chair to feed her her beef tea.

However, just after midnight Tish and I in our cabin across heard a
terrible thud, followed by silence and then by low, dreadful moans.
Aggie had fallen out. She did not speak at all for some time, and when
she did it was to horrify Tish. For she said: "Damnation!"

Tish immediately turned and left the cabin, leaving me to press a cold
knife against the lump on Aggie's head and to put her back into her
berth. She refused the hammock absolutely. She said she had forgotten
where she was, and