Day was breaking when Drew came on deck the next morning. The noises of the vessel, which had clanked and whined all night through his broken sleep, seemed to him to take on new life as he reached the deck; but the brig, as she lay rolling in the trough of the sea, had the gray, tired look of ships coming home from long voyages. There were no clouds in the sky, but the stars had faded out, and even as he gazed the rim of the sun appeared above the sea, flattened out on the horizon, then rose in an elongated ball. For an instant a red pendant seemed to cling to the far edge of the ocean; then it vanished, and the sun, round again and red, had broken free. Day had come.

The ocean had the glassy aspect of the preceding day; as far as the eye carried not a catspaw darkened the surface. In every direction the white sails of the Portuguese men-of-war rose and fell on the long blue swells. Fifty yards astern the triangular dorsal fin of a shark moved slowly across their track. Drew watched its silent progress with the fascination that the landsman, seeing it for the first time, bestows upon it as the embodiment of the cruelty and mystery of its abode.

He turned at the sound of a footstep, and, seeing Medbury beside him, greeted him, and then nodded astern.

"It's a shark, isn't it?" he asked. "I never saw one before."

"Yes," replied the mate. "It's queer, but everybody seems to know them right off. Sort of natural dislike, I guess."Medbury watched it a moment and then looked aloft to where the fly hung limp.

"It beats all," he muttered; "there isn't air enough to float a soap-bubble." He walked to the pennant halyards, and, untying them, jerked the fly free from its staff. "It hasn't lifted an inch in fifteen hours," he said. "Confound it! I believe the world has died overnight!" Then he laughed at his own ill-nature. "It always gets on my nerves—weather like this," he explained to Drew.

He turned and walked to the other side of the vessel as Captain March came on deck. He also looked aloft, glanced at the binnacle from mere force of habit, and then swept the horizon with half-shut eyes. His face was inscrutable, and absolutely without emotion. "It's going to be hot," was his only remark. Then he walked to a camp-chair, and, drawing it to the rail, sat down, and began to whistle softly.A moment later Medbury crossed over to where he sat.

"I guess I'll rig up the triangle this morning and scrape the mainmast," he said. "It's a good chance."

The captain squinted aloft, but said nothing.

"I'll start at the foot," continued the mate, as if in answer to unspoken criticism. "Maybe it'll breeze up before the men get much above the deck."

"All right," said the captain, and went on whistling.

"There isn't a breath of air," said Medbury. "I believe everything's dead."

"Nothing dead about this roll," replied Captain March.

"Well, it ought to be," replied the mate, and walked forward.

"I don't know as the crew's going to rise up and call him blessed when he orders them aloft on that job in a swell like this," said the captain to Drew; "but then, as I said, I don't know."

Then the barefooted crew came aft with buckets and brooms to wash down the decks, and he and Drew went below. When they came back to the deck, after breakfast, two men were at the grindstone sharpening their knives, and a third was scraping a bright pin-rail forward. Medbury sat on the forward end of the house, making double-crown knots in the ends of new man-ropes. He did not look up as Hetty and the minister came and stood over him, watching his work. Captain March came past the group in his morning walk.

"You're not going to scrape the mainmast, eh?" he said, as he went by. His eyes twinkled.

Medbury did not look up as he answered:

"No; I guess I'll keep them on deck."

Hetty looked aloft at the mast thrashing through a wide arc."I knew you wouldn't," she said. "It would have been—unlike you."

Medbury glanced at her with a shamefaced smile, but he made no reply.

Drew laughed.

"Do you know, I had heard so much of the harsh treatment of sailors by their officers that I came on this voyage prepared for something of the sort, and dreading it," he said, in his slow, deep voice; "but I have seen nothing but consideration."

Medbury's mouth twitched with scornful amusement; it almost seemed to him that Drew had unknowingly called him pusillanimous. He was by no means a hard man, and was popular with his crews; but he was young and a certain amount of swagger seemed amusing, while, in addition, he had all the contempt of the American sailor for the stolid alien creatures who more and more were finding their way into the forecastles of ships that carried his country's flag."I don't believe in being a brute," he began; "but—"

"Yes," broke in Hetty, eagerly; "it is only a brute who will take advantage of his power. I have been going to sea all my life, but I have never seen cruelty. All the sailors I know are the largest-hearted of men. I hate the tales that blacken them."

"I have known them only ashore," said Drew, "and I certainly never knew a more joyous, open-hearted people—hardly the sort to make tyrants of." He turned to Medbury: "But you were going to say—?"

Medbury sharply drew the strands of his rope through the outer walling of the knot as he replied:

"Oh, nothing."

"I fancy," began Drew, "that sailors are too practical a class, too constantly surrounded by danger, not to know the value of self-restraint. It is wise to keep far from one the passion that fires the mind beyond the point where the every-day work of living is accomplished with the least friction."

Medbury glanced up as he spoke, and caught the look that Hetty fastened upon the speaker. There was nothing in the quiet gaze beyond interest and the sympathy of kindred convictions, but it gave Medbury the curious sensation of standing apart from them, of being irrevocably alone. He turned away with a new pain about his heart. He was still thinking of Hetty's look when Drew, busily erecting his card-house of the sailor's life upon a foundation of calm philosophy, asked him if he had ever seen cruelty on shipboard. His tone was the confident one of the philosopher who, having formulated a theory, calmly awaits the facts that will establish it.

"You two might call it that," Medbury answered, not without a touch of resentment in his voice; "I shouldn't. It's easy enough to talk about self-restraint, but when it means letting things go to the dogs, and maybe putting your vessel in danger—" He thrust his fid between the strands of his rope with an energy that seemed to him adequately to complete his meaning.

Drew was dimly aware that the situation had somehow become charged with feeling, and remained silent; but Hetty, with clearer instinct, recognized the cause of Medbury's heat, and resented it, while she recognized its potential force, feeling that she had unwittingly been drawn from the calm current of broad discussion into an inner vortex of personal emotion. That she had become unduly interested in Drew—she clearly saw that the thought was in Medbury's mind—she indignantly denied to herself. She turned toward the sailor with resentment shining in her eyes; but at the sight of his head bowed above his work, there flashed over her a strange revulsion of feeling. It was not tenderness, though compounded of tenderness, pity, and the memory of many things. His loyalty to her, which had lived on through long years in spite of varying encouragement, had sometimes provoked her vexation, sometimes her complacency; at this moment it suddenly appeared to her to be a beautiful thing. His hair waved a little about his brows; his face, though sad, showed the old fine courage. She saw his close-shut lips held nothing of harshness. His hands, brown and sinewy, revealed strength and skill, and were as yet uncoarsened by hard contact with hemp and canvas in cold and wet and sun. "After all, he's a man," she thought, with tears welling in her eyes.

She turned and looked out across the shining sea, feeling its immensity, its power in the moving waves, to be somehow strangely like the life that inclosed her and swept her on without the power of volition. She did not turn as Drew spoke."Shall we finish our book?" he had asked her.

From time to time in the last few days he had read aloud from the "Idylls of the King" while she worked at some trifle, or sat with hands clasped in her lap and watched the waves in a pleasurable emotion to which his fine, unaffected voice had contributed quite as largely as the words of the poet. At this moment his question, in its abrupt withdrawal from the general interest, seemed tactless. For an instant she made no answer.

"No, not now," she said at last. "Just at present it seems too unreal, too far away, to move me. I don't believe I am an imaginative person; life appeals to me too strongly."

She had turned to watch Medbury's work while she was yet speaking, and Drew, lingering a moment, had gone away with the impression of dismissal. This she felt, and was troubled by it, and vexed at finding herself troubled. Her vexation had the effect of bringing her nearer in spirit to Medbury.

"I believe I could do that," she said as she watched him.

He looked up with a flush of pleasure.

"Want to try?" he asked, and jumped to his feet. "I'll get a piece of manila and teach you."

He threw down a coil of running rigging for a seat for her, and together they laughingly began the lesson.

"I always envied the things boys did," she said. "I know how I used to watch them, but was too afraid of being called a tomboy ever to attempt anything. It's hard to be ambitious and sensitive, too."

"I know you could run when you were a child," he said, smiling. "Do you remember the time you snatched my hat and I did not catch you till you got to Martha Parsons's gate? Then you turned and looked so serious that I did not dare to take it.""Yes," she answered, with a laugh. "And I remember how frightened I was when you followed me. I thought I had done the boldest thing. And when we stopped and just looked at each other I was sure that you thought so, too. Finally I said, 'Here's your hat,' and you said, 'Oh,' and took it. I don't remember now how it ended."

"I do," he said promptly. "I took it and went away; afterward I went back, but you had gone. Then I thought of all the things I ought to have said and done when it was too late."

"Well, it was silly enough," she said, dismissing the subject. "I don't know what made me do it."

He had unlaid the strands of the rope while they talked, and now, placing it in her hand, he showed her how to make a bight with one strand and pass a second around the first, and a third around the second, and up through the bight of the first, forming the wall.

"Now you try," he said, and, undoing the knot, passed the rope to her.

In a moment she held it up triumphantly.

"What do you do next?" she asked.

"Now we will put on the double crown."

"It is hard," she said after a moment more. "It looked simple enough while you were doing it." She held the rope in her hand and looked at him in smiling despair. "I shall never learn."

"Yes, you will," he assured her. "You only need a little patience."

"You will need the patience," she answered.

"Haven't I always had it with you?" he asked in a low voice.

"Is that right?" she demanded, holding up the knot.

"Yes; now run the end—no, this end—through the bight. That's right; now pull it taut. You haven't answered my question, Hetty."