The donkeyman was inclined to be garrulous, and evidently lusted for a considerable chat; but, with returning strength, Onslow’s anxiety grew on him again, and he climbed out on deck keen to be once more in action. His knees were tottery, and the donkeyman gave him an arm aft. But when he had climbed up the ladder and gained the bridge deck, he stood for a minute staring, and then threw up his hands and pitched forward on to the planking, as though a bullet had bitten the life in his brain. The big donkeyman also was startled. Out of the morning mists of the south there had come up a small center-board schooner of some fifteen tons—an oysterman, perhaps, in the season, and now a sponge-gatherer or a mere coaster. She was coming down over the seas dry as a gull, driving along under her boom foresail and jib. The donkeyman’s eye hung on her as she surged past the rust-streaked flank of the steamer, some twenty fathoms away, not because the sight of a little white-painted schooner was new to him, not because he was impressed by the danger to the _Port Edes’_ enterprise in her being seen by any alien eye, but on account of the tiny vessel being handled (in what to her was distinctly ugly weather) by so extraordinary a person as a young and pretty girl. No one else was on deck, and the girl sat on the coaming of the cockpit, tiller in one hand, tiller rope in the other, as unconcernedly as though she had been an ancient mariner, bred and aged in fore-and-afters. She was a girl, too, with looks much to the Irishman’s liking: with copper-red hair, whose ends blew out from beneath a green Italian’s nightcap; laughing, impudent features, with the color whipped up into warm pinks by the wind; a figure of pretty curves; and the shapeliest little brown fists in the world splayed on the tiller and gripping the restraining tiller-rope. She was fairly well up to the eyes in her steering, but she found time to throw an _œillade_ towards the steamer, which Mr. Sullivan answered with a yell intended to show his complete admiration, and a swirl of his greasy cap. It was then that Onslow fell, and the donkeyman took his eyes from the schooner, and picked him up and once more applied the whisky-bottle. “More drowned than I thought for!” he muttered. “It’ll be a pig’s mess for us if he goes ill.” But Patrick Onslow had not fainted through the effect of his recent struggle with death. It was quite another matter which had dealt him the sufficing shock. In the steerer of that little schooner he had seen the sister of the woman to whom he had once been affianced, who had discarded him for another man, who had driven him from a sedate English life to be a wanderer and a vagabond upon the face of the earth. His roamings had begun and continued only because the image of this one woman had refused to leave his thoughts; and the half-sarcastic nickname of “The Great Traveler” had been gained without any seeking on his part.