‘Look!’ he said, holding up a little inlaid box. ‘I was afrayd of it; I lookéd for it last night, you know,’--there was a curious note of appeal in his voice,--‘but dosé fallows are so cunning, you know.’ I looked at the face lying upturned to the growing light. It was no longer twisted; the eyes stared quietly at the roof of the bunk, the hands were crossed peacefully on the sunken chest. In that face, which had writhed the night before in hunted agony, there remained only the little brown stain at the corner of the mouth to mark it as the same. ‘Dead?’ ‘Quite.’ The mate knelt, and reverently drew the lids over the quiet eyes. Young Raymond was leaning silently apart against the side of the cabin, his head framed in the open port-hole, and his face was ever grey and drawn. I turned from him to the mate. ‘How?’ He answered the double question of my glances hurriedly. ‘No,--it was an accident, see--’ he unscrewed the lid of the little box, and counted the tiny black-brown pills in it. ‘Six--seven--ãyt--there are manny happy hours, you see; while desé were here, he would not have done it, you know. No, it was an accident,--perrhaps he took one too manny,--but it was the heat, you know, and that’--he laid his hand gently over the dead man’s heart. ‘Poor fallow! I likéd him greatly.’ There was a long silence in the little cabin; the faint ‘lip-lip’ of the rising waves against the ship’s side seemed very far away somehow, and the measured tramp of the second mate on the poop above sounded in muffled harmony to our thoughts--then six bells rang out clear and full. ‘It is Cotter’s watch still,’ said the mate, ‘I am free for an hour yet. We must talk, you know.’ He moved over and shut the door, then seated himself on the side of the dead man’s bunk with a reverent callousness, born of an intimate familiarity with many kinds of death. The ends of the Doctor’s dusky crimson sash hanging over the upper bunk quivered slightly, with the faint rolling of the ship, against the mate’s smoothly dark head, as he crouched forward with his back hunched, and his bearded chin thrust out. His hands were clasped round one knee, the thin leg below them working incessantly with a quick, nervous movement. All the time he was speaking, he looked straight at young Raymond with his mournful eyes, and the latter, who had never moved from his leaning attitude against the cabin side, gazed abstractedly in front of him from out of a growing halo of flame-coloured light. The ship’s cat purring softly was rubbing itself slowly against the white trousered leg.