20. Herbert tried to communicate with me by slipping a paper under the door, but I did not get it, and he has been put in irons. Captain Eliot boasts of it. I wish he would bind us together and let us drown in one another's arms, as they did in the Huguenot persecution. 28. A little paper tied to a string hung in front of my bull's-eye window to-day: I took it in. The first officer had lowered it down: "Captain Eliot says you are ill, but I don't believe it. If he tries violence, scream, and I will break open the door. I am always on the watch. Keep your heart up." This is a drop of comfort in my black cup, but my little window was screwed down within an hour after I had read the paper. _June_ 10. My spirit is worn out: I can endure no more. I have begged my husband to kill me and end my misery. I don't know why he hesitated. He means to do it some time, but perhaps he cannot think of torture exquisite enough for his purpose. 11. My husband came in about four in the afternoon, looking so vindictive that my heart stood still. He gradually worked himself into a frenzy, and aimed a blow at my head: instinct, rather than the love of life, made me parry it, and I got the stroke on my wrist. I screamed, and at the same moment there was a tumult on deck, and the ship quivered as if she too had been violently struck. Captain Eliot rushed on deck, and began to give hurried orders. I could hear the first officer contradict them, and then there was a heavy fall, and two or three men stumbled down the cabin stairs, carrying some weight between them. _Later_. My husband is helpless, and Herbert has been with me, urging me passionately to trust myself to him in a little boat at midnight. He says there are several ships in sight, and one of them will be almost sure to pick us up. He swears that he will leave me, and never see me again (if I say so), so soon as he has placed me in safety, but he will save me, by force if need be, from the brute into whose hands I fell so innocently. If the ship does not see us, it is but dying, after all. Good-bye, mother! I pray that this paper will reach you before Captain Eliot can send you his own account, but if it does not, you will believe me innocent all the same. This was the last, and I folded up the papers as they had come to me. That night I read them all to Pedro. "They was drownded--I knew it," said Pedro; and nothing could remove that opinion. A ghost is more convincing than logic. Our voyage wore on, with one day just like another: my brother looked at the sun every day, and put down a few cabalistic figures on a slate, but his steady business was reading novels to his wife and drinking weak claret and water.