Brewster, could
misunderstand.

Her own terror rushed upon me, and in that moment of fear--the most
terrible fear a man can experience--I knew that in inexpressible ways she
was dear to me. The knowledge that I loved her rushed upon me with the
terror, and with both emotions gripping at my heart and causing my blood
at the same time to chill and to leap riotously, I felt myself drawn by a
power without me and beyond me, and found my eyes returning against my
will to gaze into the eyes of Wolf Larsen. But he had recovered himself.
The golden colour and the dancing lights were gone. Cold and grey and
glittering they were as he bowed brusquely and turned away.

"I am afraid," she whispered, with a shiver. "I am so afraid."

I, too, was afraid, and what of my discovery of how much she meant to me
my mind was in a turmoil; but, I succeeded in answering quite calmly:

"All will come right, Miss Brewster. Trust me, it will come right."

She answered with a grateful little smile that sent my heart pounding,
and started to descend the companion-stairs.

For a long while I remained standing where she had left me. There was
imperative need to adjust myself, to consider the significance of the
changed aspect of things. It had come, at last, love had come, when I
least expected it and under the most forbidding conditions. Of course,
my philosophy had always recognized the inevitableness of the love-call
sooner or later; but long years of bookish silence had made me
inattentive and unprepared.

And now it had come! Maud Brewster! My memory flashed back to that
first thin little volume on my desk, and I saw before me, as though in
the concrete, the row of thin little volumes on my library shelf. How I
had welcomed each of them! Each year one had come from the press, and to
me each was the advent of the year. They had voiced a kindred intellect
and spirit, and as such I had received them into a camaraderie of the
mind; but now their place was in my heart.

My heart? A revulsion of feeling came over me. I seemed to stand
outside myself and to look at myself incredulously. Maud Brewster!
Humphrey Van Weyden, "the cold-blooded fish," the "emotionless monster,"
the "analytical demon," of Charley Furuseth's christening, in love! And
then, without rhyme or reason, all sceptical, my mind flew back to a
small biographical note in the red-bound _Who's Who_, and I said to
myself, "She was born in Cambridge, and she is tw