maris.

"Yes--we're taking on cargo for all we're worth. We are booked to sail
by noon the day after to-morrow. I stretched a point in leaving at all,
which won't put me in the best odour with my officers and crew,
or--supposing they come to hear of it--with my owners either. I am
giving my plain duty the slip; but, in this singular ease, it seemed to
me, a greater duty stood back of and outweighed the plain obvious
one--since it mounted to a reconstruction, a peace-making, ridding the
souls of four persons of an ugly burden. I wanted the affair all
settled up and straightened out before this, my maiden voyage, in
command of a ship of my own. For me it is a great event, a great step
forward. And, perhaps I'm over-superstitious--most men of my trade are
supposed to be touched that way--but I admit I rather cling to the
notion of this private peace-making, this straightening out of an
ancient crookedness, as a thing of good augury, a favourable omen. As
such--let alone other reasons"--and he looked down at Damaris with a
fine and delicate admiration--"I desired it and, out of my heart, I
prize it.--Do you see?"

"Yes--indeed a thing of good augury"--she affirmed.

Yet in speaking her lips shook. For, in truth, poor child, she was
hard-pressed. This intimate intercourse, alike in its simple directness
and its novelty, began to wear on her to the point of physical distress.
She felt tremulous and faint. Not that Faircloth jarred upon or was
distasteful to her. Far from that. His youth and health, the unspoiled
vigour and force of him, captivated her imagination. Even the dash of
roughness, the lapses from conventional forms of speech and manner she
now and again observed in him, caught her fancy, heightening his
attraction for her. Nor was she any longer tormented by a sense of
isolation. For, as she recognized, he stole nothing away which heretofore
belonged to her. Rather did he add his own by no means inconsiderable
self to the sum of her possessions.--And in that last fact she probably
touched the real crux, the real strain, of the present, to her
disintegrating, situation. For in him, and in his relation to her, a
wonderful and very precious gift was bestowed upon her, namely another
human life to love and live for.--Bestowed on her, moreover, without
asking or choice of her own, arbitrarily, through the claim of his and
her common ancestry and the profound moral and spiritual obligations, the
mysterious affinities,