‘Yes!’ said the worn voice, ‘look at me!--look at me!--what am I? What have I sunk to? I, who was even as you,--public school--’Varsity--Bart’s--What’s the use of it all? Look at us, I say, look’--he clutched with one hand the arm thrown about him; and as if answering the hysterical cry, the moonlight streamed from behind the main tops’le, with a cruel suddenness, full on to the two men. It lit up the bright, fresh face and yellow hair of the one,--tall and lithe and radiantly white--and threw into a ghastly relief the other,--long, shrunken and shambling, with his twisted yellow face and sunken hunted eyes, with the little brown streak at the corner of the thin distorted mouth, the lank discoloured hair, the writhing, skeleton hands. He cowered as the light fell upon him, and buried his head like a child on young Raymond’s shoulder. When I turned again, old Carey, the Shellback, was looking steadily at the deck, and, contrary to all orders, spitting vigourously upon it. ‘Fact is we’m tu fur tu the East; yu zee, zurr, these y’er ca’ms is all along o’ that.’ What answer I made to the soft West-country drawl I know not, because it is bewildering to hear a man’s sobs drawn under hard pressure against a linen coat. Then the mate was speaking. ‘Come down to your bunk, my dear fallow, it will be ãll right, you know; I will give you some things to make you sleep.’ ‘Sleep!’ came out of the sobs, as a voice might come out of a grave, on to which the earth was being shovelled. ‘My God!--if I could sleep _without_.... Armand, for pity’s sake make me sleep--’ ‘There! there!’ young Raymond spoke as to a child. As swiftly as it had streamed forth, the moonlight hid itself behind a kindly sail, and the three soft footsteps, moving along the deck, slowly died away out of my hearing. ‘Might yu ’appen to ’ave zum baccy, zurr, the mate’s gone down, yu zee, an’ it du be rale ’ot tu-night, that’s zartain.’ I gave the understanding Carey out of my pouch, and we smoked in a sympathetic silence. * * * * * I woke with a start; a faint light was showing through the open port hole, and the half-drawn curtain of the bunk wavered unsteadily. ‘She’s moving,’ I thought, feeling with a vast sense of relief the fluttering pulse beginning to beat at last in the wind-logged ship. ‘Yes, there’s a breeze from the South-East; get up!’ Young Raymond was standing by the side of the bunk, his white clothes unchanged, but with a face unknown to me, so grave, drawn, and sunless was it. ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘The Doctor!’ he said, ‘Come!’ We crossed the dark saloon, unswept and ungarnished, just as it had been left the evening before. Raymond silently drew aside the green baize curtain of a cabin on the starboard side. Within it stood the mate, stooping over a figure stretched limply on the lower bunk; he looked up as we came in, and withdrew his hand, with something in it, from under the pillow.