As Captain Margaret drew his bunk-curtains and settled himself to sleep, the voices in his brain took bodies to them, fiery bodies, which leaned and called to him. “You’ve got the pick of the crop, the pick of the crop, the pick of the crop,” they called. “Lucky devil. Lucky devil. Oh, you lucky devil.” VIII. IN PORT “Yet still he stands prefract and insolent.” _Charles, Duke of Byron._ After breakfast the next morning the two Stukeleys sat in their stateroom talking. They had had a week of comparative isolation, of comparative privacy, very sweet to Olivia, who had learned, during the voyage, to regret the days at Salcombe, when one had but to close a door, to shut the world of love from that other world, full of thorns and thistles, where ordinary mortals walked, not having the key of the burning imagination. With Margaret and Cammock away, and Perrin seldom present at meals, owing to his fear of the badgering of Stukeley, the cabin of the _Broken Heart_ had come to be something of a home to her. She could feel again that nothing else really existed, that no one else really lived, that all the world, all the meaning and glory and life of the world, centred in the two burning mouths, in the two hearts which divined each other, apprehending all things in themselves. During that week of privacy she had even learned to think tenderly again of the three men who had shared the cabin with her. She found that she no longer resented Cammock’s want of breeding; his want of culture; his past as explained by Tom; his social position as compared with her aunt Pile’s coachman. During the voyage she had grown to dislike Margaret and Perrin, much as one dislikes the guests who have overstayed their welcome. She had been too much in the rapture of love to see things clearly, to judge character clearly; she had taken her judgments ready-made from Tom, who disliked the two men. She had liked them both as old friends; had liked them much, in the old days, before she knew life. But, under the strain of the voyage, ever prompted by Stukeley’s bitterness, while looking on them as her friends, she had come to resent their continual presence, to be cross at their conversation, which (as she felt instinctively) was restrained by their dislike of Tom, through their want of imaginative sympathy with his point of view. Now that they were no longer ever present, like spices added to each dish till every dish disgusts, she thought of them both with pity; feeling that they were growing old in their ways, narrowed in their sympathies, never knowing the meaning of life, which is love. Thus thought she, in the confidence of exulting health, in the rapture of being possessed, with the merciless pity of a newly married woman. This that she had waited for, this love which crowned and made her, it cleared the eyes, she thought, it exalted, it ennobled, it glorified. She would that those two pathetic figures,