I thought her spirit the most remarkable part of the performance. Here was a lady--a young and handsome woman, clearly a person of degree in her own country--amusing a young, rough sailor with her songs, fiddling to him, taking lessons in English from him, watching him with shining eyes, as though her heart was as charged with light as her gaze. Her voice, her face, the aroma of her manner, transformed the plain, grim little cabin of the brig into a brilliant drawing room, full of ladies and gentlemen, sweet with the scent of flowers, gay with the gleam of silk and jewel and epaulet. Who, while she sang, would have supposed that she had been shipwrecked not very long ago, living, with small hopes of deliverance, upon a desert island, in company with a couple of common, low seamen; ignorant whether her mother was alive or dead; still many thousands of miles away from her home--if Madrid was to be her home; with twenty hard fortunes before her, for all she knew? She sang me three songs, and all hands, as I knew by the shuffling of feet, listened above, some shouldering warily into the companion hatch to hear well. I reckoned she knew she had a bigger audience than I, for once she lifted her eyes in the pause of a song and smiled in a conscious way. “Now I am tired,” said she in English, and put the fiddle upon the table with capricious quickness of movement. “Good-night, Señor Fielding:” and she gave me a low, but somewhat haughty bow, and went to her cabin, stepping the short length of the deck with the most translatable carriage in life: “_I have amused you, I have condescended; but I am always the Señorita Aurora de la Cueva. Vaya!_” CHAPTER XXVI. A TRAGIC SHIFT OF COURSE. All went well with us through the month of February and through the early days of March in that year of God, 1815, until it came to pass that we arrived in the latitude 45° south, and in longitude 47° west. I was very hopeful in this time. The crew had been orderly, civil, and quick; strong, prosperous winds had swept us round the Horn and northward; we were homeward bound; we were putting the unfamiliar stars of the south over our stern; already some were gone, and some wheeled low. I walked the deck with gladness, and knew but two sorrows: that Greaves was not at my side to share in the rich issue of his own discovery and his own expedition, and that my poor, faithful, well-loved Galloon was drowned.