down the flying jib, hauled the jib-sheets to wind-ward and the
main-sheet flat, and came up into the wind. The oars struck the water,
and with a few strokes the boat was alongside. I now caught my first
fair glimpse of the woman. She was wrapped in a long ulster, for the
morning was raw; and I could see nothing but her face and a mass of light
brown hair escaping from under the seaman's cap on her head. The eyes
were large and brown and lustrous, the mouth sweet and sensitive, and the
face itself a delicate oval, though sun and exposure to briny wind had
burnt the face scarlet.

She seemed to me like a being from another world. I was aware of a
hungry out-reaching for her, as of a starving man for bread. But then, I
had not seen a woman for a very long time. I know that I was lost in a
great wonder, almost a stupor,--this, then, was a woman?--so that I
forgot myself and my mate's duties, and took no part in helping the
new-comers aboard. For when one of the sailors lifted her into Wolf
Larsen's downstretched arms, she looked up into our curious faces and
smiled amusedly and sweetly, as only a woman can smile, and as I had seen
no one smile for so long that I had forgotten such smiles existed.

"Mr. Van Weyden!"

Wolf Larsen's voice brought me sharply back to myself.

"Will you take the lady below and see to her comfort? Make up that spare
port cabin. Put Cooky to work on it. And see what you can do for that
face. It's burned badly."

He turned brusquely away from us and began to question the new men. The
boat was cast adrift, though one of them called it a "bloody shame" with
Yokohama so near.

I found myself strangely afraid of this woman I was escorting aft. Also
I was awkward. It seemed to me that I was realizing for the first time
what a delicate, fragile creature a woman is; and as I caught her arm to
help her down the companion stairs, I was startled by its smallness and
softness. Indeed, she was a slender, delicate woman as women go, but to
me she was so ethereally slender and delicate that I was quite prepared
for her arm to crumble in my grasp. All this, in frankness, to show my
first impression, after long denial of women in general and of Maud
Brewster in particular.

"No need to go to any great trouble for me," she protested, when I had
seated her in Wolf Larsen's arm-chair, which I had dragged hastily from
his cabin. "The men were looking for land at any moment this morning,
and