“Sir,” I answered, facing about. “She will be making love to you in your own tongue before another week is out,” he called. “Such a voice as hers would keep anything not deaf listening as long as she liked.” “She has a very sweet voice,” he exclaimed, “and she is a very fine woman. But should she pick up our tongue, you’ll find the devil that’s inside of her come drifting out horns first with the earliest of her speech. Talk of your fears of the crew! She’s the sort of party to carry a ship single-handed, though the vessel mounted the guns and was manned by the complement of the _Royal Sovereign_. She is learning English for some piratic motive--it may be the dollars, it may be the brig--for she don’t want to go, and I dare say she don’t mean to go round the Horn without her mother. Bol, is this the last load?” “Der last loadt, sir.” “Bear a hand then to whip the water aboard, and let us get away.” It was a quarter before one by the time we had chocked and secured the longboat and were ready to start on a passage that was to carry us over many thousands of miles of salt water. The breeze had freshened; soft small clouds, like shadings in pencil, were sailing up off the edge of the sea into the misty blue overhead; the luster of the sun was still pale and brassy, and a look of wind was in the yellow of the disk-shaped spread of radiance, out of which he looked like an eye of fire in a target of gold. “Make sail, Fielding,” called Greaves, from his chair, on which he had been sitting ever since he came on deck, though in all those hours he had not once complained of pain. “Make sail and heap it on her. Bring her head due south, and let her go.” The braces of the yards of the main were manned, the wheel turned, the canvas filled as the fiery breath, that was now brushing the sea, and that seemed to come the hotter for the very dimness of the sunshine, gushed over the quarter. We squared away to it; and now the island slided by, opening features of its swart, melancholy, loathly rocks, which had been invisible before. The milk-white burst of surge made the base of the cliff in the wash of it black. I noticed a hovering of pale radiance upon the patch of verdure where the grove or wood stood. It was no more than a patch to our distant eye; it was like the dance of the South African silver tree. The verdure had the gleam of an emerald, and you thought of a gem on the sallow breast of death. I was full of the business of making sail, yet could find an eye for the island as it veered away on the quarter. Greaves gazed at it intently, so did the lady Aurora as she stood at the rail, with her profile cut clear and keen as a marble bust against the sky over the horizon. The mouth of the cave yawned upon us, then narrowed, then thinned into a slice, then vanished round a shoulder of cliff.