"I can't let you go," she whispered. Exasperation almost strangled him and set afire his unhinged brain. "For Christ's sake!" he cried. "What do you care?" "I--I care," she stammered--"for Christ's sake ... And yours!" Things went dark before her eyes.... She opened them after a while on the sofa where he had carried her. He was standing looking down at her. ... After a long while the ghost of a smile touched her lips. In his haunted gaze there was no response. But he said in an altered, unfamiliar voice: "I'll go if you say so. I'll do all that's in me to do. ... Will you be there--for the first day or two?" "Yes.... All day long.... Every day if you want me. Do you?" "Yes.... But God knows what I may do to you.... There'll be somebody to--watch me--won't there?... I don't know what may happen to you or to myself.... I'm in a bad way, Miss Erith... I'm in a very bad way." "I know," she murmured. He said with an almost childish directness: "Do men always live through such cures?... I don't see how I can live through it." She rose from the sofa and stood beside him, feeling still dizzy, still tremulous and lacking strength. "Let us win through," she said, not looking at him. "I think you will suffer more than I shall. A little more.... Because I had rather feel pain than give it--rather suffer than look on suffering.... It will be very hard for us both, I fear." Her butler announced luncheon. CHAPTER IV WRECKAGE The man had been desperately ill in soul and mind and body. And now in some curious manner the ocean seemed to be making him physically better but spiritually worse. Something, too, in the horizonwide waste of waters was having a sinister effect on his brain. The grey daylight of early May, bitter as December--the utter desolation, the mounting and raucous menace of the sea, were meddling with normal convalescence. Dull animosity awoke in a battered mind not yet readjusted to the living world. What had these people done to him anyway? The sullen resentment which invaded him groped stealthily for a vent. Was THIS, then, their cursed cure?--this foggy nightmare through which he moved like a shade in the realm of phantoms? Little by little what had happened to him was becoming an obsession, as he began to remember in detail. Now he brooded on it and looked askance at the girl who was primarily responsible--conscious in a confused sort of way that he was a blackguard for his ingratitude. But his mind had been badly knocked about, and its limping machinery creaked. "That meddling woman," he thought, knowing all the time what he owed her, remembering her courage, her unselfishness, her loveliness. "Curse her!" he muttered, amid the shadows confusing his wounded mind. Then a meaningless anger grew with him: She had him, now! he was trapped and caged. A girl who drags something floundering out of hell is entitled to the thing if she wants it. He admitted that to himself. But how about that "cure"?