"So I took her wrist and, she scarcely wincing, injected the last drop of my morphia: yes, Roddy, and kissed the spot like any poor fool, she not resisting! . . . Her last words were that I should lay the guitar back again on her lap. . . . Oh, damn it, man! it was everything your damned sneerer would choose to call it. . . . But I tell you I held my ear close to her breast for hours; and in my light-headedness I heard the muted music lulling her: and in and out of her breathing, when she was long past speech--and above the stertorous snoring of my enemy laid at her feet--I heard distant waves breaking in a low chime to some words of a verse I had once quoted to her on a night when her song had made the crews sorrowful for a while before lifting their hearts again to make them merry--music to ripple, ripple:" '--Ripple in my hearing Like waves upon a lonely beach, where no craft anchoreth; That I may steep my soul therein, and craving naught, nor fearing, Drift on through slumber to a dream, and through a dream to death.' "My ear was close to her breast, listening, as the last breath went out with a flutter . . . and Santa was dead, having conquered me-- conquered me far beyond my guessing; but up to the moment having subdued me so effectively that my sole kiss of her had been taken, kneeling, upon the wrist, as one kisses faith to a sovereign, and had never been returned. Through the night I held her wrist until it was cold." "Towards dawn, and just at that moment when a watcher's spirits are at their lowest, Farrell stirred, stretched out his legs, drew them up again, and asked how things were? . . . For his part (he added, sitting up weakly), he felt a different man. "'It behoves you to be,' said I with some sternness. 'Take the tiller and--yes, you may hold on to it with some firmness. Your wife is dead.' "'Santa!' he gasped. 'Oh, my God!' and cast himself upon her body, seemly bestowed as I could serve it. "'Get off of it,' I shouted, 'before I brain you!' I held the very gaff with which Grimalson had torn my arm. He had plucked the tiller from the rudder-head, and with these two weapons in our right hands we faced one another, each with his left feeling for the revolver he carried. "Then Farrell, who stood facing the bows, shot out his right as if jabbing at me with the stick, a foot short of my shoulder. The action was, as a stroke, so idiotic that, although it might so easily have meant death to me, I turned half-about to where the stick pointed, as the helmless boat yawed. "And there, above the low-lying wisps of morning fog, stood three peaks: two sharp and the third blunted: and, below the fog, ran a thin white ribbon of breaking water!