It was idle, however, to think of going on deck. I durst not leave my darling alone lest she should swoon and be thrown down and injured, perhaps killed; whilst, for myself, the legs of a man needed a longer apprenticeship to the sea than ever I had served, or had the faintest desire to serve, to qualify him for such capering planks as these, and I was quite sure that if I wished to break my neck I had nothing more to do than to make an attempt to stand. Well, some twenty minutes, or, perhaps, half an hour passed, during all which time I believed every moment to be our last, and I recollect cursing myself for being the instrument of introducing the darling of my heart into this abominable scene of storm in which, as I believed, we were both to perish. Why had I not gone ashore yesterday? Did not my instincts advise me to quit the sea and take the railway? Why had I brought my pet away from the security of the Rue de Maquétra? Why, in the name of all the virtues, was I so impatient that I could not wait till she was of age, when I could have married her comfortably and respectably, freed from all obligations of ladders, dark lanterns, tempests, and whatever was next to come? I could have beaten my head upon the table. Never did I better understand what I have always regarded as a stroke of fiction--I mean the disposition of a man in a passion to tear out his hair by the roots. At the expiration, as I supposed, of twenty minutes, the hatch cover was opened, this time without any following screech and blast of wind, and Caudel descended. Had he been a beam of sunshine he could not have been more welcome to my eyes. He was clad from head to foot in oilskins, from which the wet ran as from an umbrella in a thunder-shower, and the skin and hue of his face resembled soaked leather. "Well, Mr. Barclay, sir," he exclaimed, "and how have you been getting on? It's been a bad job; but there's nothen to alarm ye, I'm sure." Then catching sight of Grace's face, he cried, "The young lady ain't been and hurt herself, I hope, sir?" "Her fear and this movement," I answered, "have proved too much for her. I wish you would pull off your oilskins and help me to convey her to the lee side there. The edge of this table seems to be cutting me in halves," the fact being that I was to windward with the whole weight of my sweetheart, who rested lifelessly against me to increase the pressure, so that at every leeward stoop of the craft my breast was caught by the edge of the table with a sensation as of a knife cutting through my shirt. He instantly whipped off his streaming waterproofs, standing without the least inconvenience whilst the decks slanted under him like a see-saw, and in a very few moments he had safely placed Grace on the lee locker with her head on a pillow. I made shift to get round to her without hurting myself, then cried to Caudel to sit and tell me what had happened.