ry day bade me the more and more to
congratulate myself upon being blessed with such a comrade as Lancelot.

Nevertheless, the best part of the business was the presence of
Marjorie. She was a true child of the sea. She loved it as if she had
been such a mermaiden as old poets fable. She had sailed with her uncle
ever since she was a little girl. She was as good a sailor as her
brother, and took foul weather as gallantly as fair. For it was not all
smooth sailing, for all our luck. There were squalls and there were
storms; but the Royal Christopher rode the billows bravely, and Marjorie
faced the storm as fearlessly as the oldest hand on board.

There was one wild night, when we rose and fell in a fury of wind. She
must needs be on deck, so I fastened her to one of the masts with a rope
and held on next to her while we watched the war of the elements. The
rain was strong, and it soaked all the clothes on her body to a pulp;
and her long hair floated on the wind, and sometimes flapped across my
face and made my blood tingle. She stuck to her post like a man--or, let
me say in her honour, like a woman--watching the strife, and every now
and then she would put her lips close to my ear--for the screaming of
the wind whistled away all words that were not so spoken--and would bid
me note some wonder of sky or water. For by this time we were great
friends, Marjorie and I, and she always treated me as if I were some
kinsman of her house instead of what I was, a poor adventurer in the
dawn of his first adventure. She liked me I knew from the start because
Lancelot liked me, and because she trusted in Lancelot with the same
implicit faith that he addressed to her. And where she liked she liked
wholly, as a generous man might, giving her friendship freely in the
firm clasp of her hand, in the keen, even greeting of her eyes. It was a
strange grace for me to share in that wonderful fellowship of brother
and sister, and I joyed in my fortune and shut my mind against any
thought of the sorrow that might come to me from such sweet intercourse.
For I knew from the first as I have said that I loved her, and I knew,
too, that it would be about as reasonable to fall in love with a star or
a dream. Those gentry who write verses, find, as I believe, a kind of
bitter satisfaction in recording their pains in rhyme, but for me there
was no such solace. Yet on that driving night, in that high wind, I
would have rejoiced to be apprenticed to the