'I thank you for your kind words, sir,' he said, with colour and embarrassment, 'and for yours, Miss Otway. I felt very sorry for you when I found you alone on that dismasted hulk, and I swore to myself I would so act that, come what might, if you were spared, you should be able to say of me, He was a man.' I could have hugged him! We seated ourselves and all our talk ran upon the hull, and upon my own adventures. I particularly noticed Selby's respectful manner to Marie. _That_ was as satisfying to every instinct within me as though I had shared their imprisonment. It was not a thing he just put on; it sat with the unconscious ease of an old and fixed habit. I heard it in his voice, I marked it in his manner of attention when she spoke; in twenty subtle ways it was expressed as something abiding; it was, in short, the man's, the seaman's, and the gentleman's recognition of her claims as a woman and of her station; I knew it had been with him from the beginning, and I loved him from that moment with a heart unshadowed by the faintest anxiety or misgiving. I asked him how they had managed for food. 'The hold was full of good things, sir,' he answered. 'We did not stint ourselves, Miss Otway,' said he, smiling. 'Mr. Selby cooks charmingly,' said Marie. 'I shall never forget the delicious dishes of broth you used to make for me.' 'The ship's cargo,' said he, 'consisted of a quantity of articles of potted food with drink enough in stout, brandy, and whiskey to fill the half of London with uproar and murder.' 'We had biscuits as big as bricks,' said Marie. 'I used to make bread and milk with them.' 'Milk!' I ejaculated. 'Preserved milk, sir,' said Selby. 'I found some hundredweights of the stuff.' 'But your fuel?' said I. 'There was about twelve ton of coal in the forepeak when we got on the ice,' he answered. 'I never reckoned upon a long stay, the young lady was to be kept warm, and I was a bit extravagant at the start. Then as the days passed and nothing came along, I began to stint, with the result that I've left about half the stock behind.' 'Did nothing heave in sight?' 'Oh, yes, sir; but never close in. I must have consumed half the cargo of theatrical scenery, and pounds worth of patent fuel and India-rubber in burning flares at night and making smokes by day. I reckon the smoke was taken for something in the volcanic line. For a long time the ice hid us from the sea. The island whose rupture threw us aloft drifted away and gave us a clear view for a bit, but others came cruising along with the stream of the tide, if it was not the wind that brought them, and one moored itself right abreast--grounded, I allow--it stuck so long. 'The whaler that reported you,' said I, 'was close in enough to get a good sight of the wreck.' 'I did not see her,' he answered. 'I must have been below when she passed.'