“The best of us get rattled,” said the host, consolingly. “I'm not a policeman, sheriff, or detective, mate. I'll report this case as Captain Downs and so many souls saved from the schooner _Alden_. You'd better trot along up to the city and face 'em as a man should. I'll rig you out in some of my clothes. Your old friend, Wass, meant well by rushing you away, but I've always found that in a man's fight you can't do much unless you're close enough to t'other fellow to hit him when he reaches for you.” A half-hour later, made presentable in the coast-guard captain's liberty suit, Mayo walked through the kitchen. Bradish and the cook were still in front of the stove. The captain's wife, standing in a door which admitted to an inner room, put up a finger to signal the young man and then nodded her head in invitation. “The young lady wants to see you, sir,” she informed him in a whisper, when he stepped to her side. “Go in!” She closed the door behind him and remained in the kitchen. He stood in the middle of the room and gazed at the girl for some time, and neither of them spoke. She was swathed in blankets and was huddled in a big chair; her face was wan and her eyes showed her weariness. But her voice was firm and earnest when she addressed him. “Captain Mayo, what I am going to say to you will sound very strange. Tell me that you'll listen to me as you would listen to a man.” “I'm afraid--” he stammered. “It's too bad that man and woman can seldom meet on the plane where man and man meet. But I don't want to be considered a girl just now. I'm one human being, and you're another, and I owe something to you which must be paid, or I shall be disgraced by a debt which will worry me all my life.” She put out her hands and knotted the fingers together in appeal. “Understand me--help me!” He was ill at ease. He feared with all his soul to meet the one great subject. “When we thought we were going to die I told you it seemed as if I had lived a life in a few hours--that I did not seem like the same person as I looked into my thoughts. Captain Mayo, that is true. It is more apparent to me now when I have had time to search my soul. Oh, I am not the Alma Marston who has been spoiled and indulged--a fool leaping here and there with every impulse--watching a girl in my set do a silly thing and then doing a sillier thing in order to astonish her. That has been our life in the city. I never knew what it meant to be a mere human being, near death. You know you saved me from that death!” “I only did what a man ought to do, Miss Marston.” “Perhaps. But you did it, that's the point. There are other men--” She hesitated. “I have had a talk with Mr. Bradish,” she told him. “It was a mistake. You saved me from that mistake. You did it in the cabin of the schooner. He has told me. It was better for me than saving my life.” “But because a man isn't a sailor--isn't used to danger--” he expostulated.