‘No; don’t you see that I am about to bandage you--so! Do not remove this bandage. There is something that needs to heal, and your young Frenchman’s sticking-plaister has not helped you.’ The surgeon left me after saying that he would send me a powerful tonic, which I was to take so many times a day, and when he was gone I got out of the bunk, in which I had slept fully dressed, and going to the glass over the washstand looked into it. The face that gazed back upon me was no longer the forbidding, the almost repulsive countenance that I remembered. The removal of the darkened and bloodstained strips of sticking-plaister had made a wonderful difference. In their place was a snow-white bandage, skilfully fitted. It hid a portion of the right brow, and descended so as to conceal the bridge of the nose, but it left my right eye visible; and when I looked at my eyes I observed that they were no longer leaden and lustreless, but that, on the contrary, there was the light of life in them, and the dark pupils soft and liquid. This I knew by comparing my face with the face with which I had awoke to consciousness on board the brig; but I remembered no other face than _that_. I stood for some while staring in the glass, recalling the assurance of the surgeon that I was a woman of four- or five-and-twenty, and contrasting that notion with the belief Alphonse had expressed, that my age was forty-five, and I kept on saying to myself, _Who am I?_ and silently repeating over and over again the letters A. C. until, recalling Mr. McEwan’s advice to me not to strain my brain, I broke away with a sudden horror, as of insanity, from the glass, and went to the cabin porthole. I could see very little of the sky and sea, but what I saw was beautiful with the colouring of the rich dark gold of sunset. I gazed almost directly west, and as much as I could behold of the heavens that way was a glowing and a throbbing crimson, barred with streaks of violet gloriously edged with ruby flames. The sea ran red as the sky; every ridged head of purple broke into rosy froth. In the heart of this little circle of western magnificence formed by the porthole was a ship with orange-coloured sails. I watched her, and thought of the young Frenchman, and wondered whether the crew of the brig had perished, as Captain Ladmore supposed, or whether they had been picked up during the darkness of the night by some vessel that had passed at too great a distance to be observed by the people of the _Deal Castle_. Whilst I stood thus looking and thinking, the door was opened by an under-steward to enable Mrs. Richards to enter with a tray, which she grasped with both hands.