'He was not dead,' I told her (though I knew very well what would be the end), 'when we came away. Many a man recovers who hath had a sword-thrust through the body. He may now be on the mend--who can tell?' Yet I knew, I say, very well how it must have ended. 'Consider, my dear: he tempted the wrath of God, if any man ever did. If he is destroyed, on his own head be it--not on ours. If he recover, he will have had a lesson which will serve him for the rest of his life. If he doth not recover, he may have time left him for something of repentance and of prayer. Why, Alice, if we get safely to our port we ought to consider the punishment of this sinner (which was in self-defence, as one may truly say) the very means granted by Providence for our own escape. How else should we have got away? How else should we have resolved to venture all, even to carrying Robin with us?' All this, I repeat, I said to encourage her, because, if I know aught of wounds, a man bleeding inwardly of a sword-thrust through his vitals would have short time for the collecting of his thoughts or the repentance of his sins, being as truly cut off in the midst of them as if he had been struck down by a thunderbolt. A man may groan and writhe under the dreadful torture of such a wound, but there is little room for meditation or for repentance. Then I asked her if she was in fear as to the event of the voyage. 'I fear nothing,' she told me, 'but to be captured and taken back to the place whence we came, there to be put in prison and flogged. That is my only fear. Humphrey, we have suffered so much that this last shame would be too great for me to bear. Oh! to be tied up before all the men, and flogged like the black women--'twould kill me, Humphrey!' 'Alice,' I said very earnestly, 'art thou, indeed, brave enough to endure death itself rather than this last barbarity?' 'Oh! Death!--death!' she cried, clasping her hands. 'What is death to me, who have lost everything?' 'Nay, but consider, my dear. To die at sea--it means to sink down under the cold water out of the light of day; to be choked for want of air; perhaps to be devoured quick by sharks; to lie at the bottom of the water, the seaweed growing over your bones; to be rolled about by the troubled waves----' 'Humphrey, these are old wives' tales. Why, if it had been lawful I would have killed myself long ago. But I must not lose heaven as well as earth. A brief pang it is to die, and then to be happy for ever. What do I care whether the seaweed covers my bones, or the cold clay? Oh, Humphrey, Humphrey, why should I care any longer to live?'