Then it would stop; all that she could ask would be that it might soon stop. Perrin was the only person whom she could bear to see, or to speak with. It was through him, she guessed, that her husband was removed from her sight. He was living now, Perrin told her, in the ’tween-decks, having his meals in the wardroom. Perrin, Margaret, and Cammock had taken to living in their cabins, so that she might not be oppressed with company. She filled in the unsaid portion of Perrin’s speech with “living with Mrs. Inigo”; and she knew from Perrin’s face that he understood her thought, and that she was right. She liked Perrin more and more as the days passed. She understood him now, she thought. The world had gentled him by some such blow as had crushed her. She could never think of him as the thoroughly foolish man he was. She only thought of him as a poor hurt waif, almost a woman in many ways, who felt for her keenly enough to know that he must not show his feeling. She liked his shy way of coming into the cabin in the late afternoon, when the steward served the chocolate. He would enter shyly, speaking with a false air of jocularity, to propose chess, poetry, a game at cards, or a little music. The time would pass quietly. He would lose that false air of his; they would talk together almost like sisters, until the change of the watch at six o’clock. He helped her through her worst days, nor did she ever know that the tales he told her, the little jokes in his conversation, were repeated from the talk of the man she hated; as the hated man had planned, in his blind love for her.