Now, under ordinary conditions, Carter would have recognized the circumstances, and have remembered his service, and swallowed the dose with a smile and a shrug. But things had gone woefully awry with him during the last score of hours. The strain of the fight, the discovery that the man K. O'Neill of the letters was Miss Kate in the flesh, the uncertain future of two Coast factories, the way in which everybody received his engagement to Laura Slade; all these things piled up on one another had set his usually steady nerves jangling in a way to which he was unaccustomed, and he felt himself forced by a rather insane impulse to do something startling. He had successive inclinations to throw up his berth altogether and go home; to marry Laura Slade out of hand by the kind assistance of Captain Image and the _M'poso's_ log-book, which occurred to him as the local equivalent of Gretna Green; to violently abuse Miss Kate O'Neill for being herself. Finally, when the premonitory symptoms of a well-earned dose of fever gripped him with a stab and a shudder, he had the usual malarial depression, which put the usual question as to whether life were really worth living. Over and above all these things, since the first moment of seeing Kate, it had been borne in upon him that he had made a mistake over his engagement. He did not for a moment think of getting free; he was doggedly determined to see it through, or in other words to marry Laura, whatever the cost and result might be. But from that date onward he began to ask himself inconvenient questions. He demanded of his inner conscience a definition of that impalpable thing, love. He wished to be informed (from the same source and at the shortest notice) if he was exactly in love with Miss Slade at that particular moment, and when the phenomenon commenced, and how long it was likely to endure. And when Laura, who saw into a good deal more of all this than he expected, offered to release him from his promise, he abused her for the suggestion, and protested his affection for her with such warmth that he feared very much after the interview that he had hopelessly overdone it. As a consequence, when Captain Image explained in a two-minute speech that Mr. Flame-tipped Carter was violating the etiquette of nations in daring to pollute that upper bridge with his undesirable feet, without direct invitation, he rather welcomed the opportunity and retorted in kind.