In every particular so different from this man. She had met but very few men whom she felt she could trust implicitly. Some of the most apparently sincere had proved the least worthy. And they were the most dangerous. They drew your trust, and so disarmed and then most treacherously betrayed you. Oh, she had seen it, time and again, and so her mind had come to look on men in general as beasts of prey, to be dreaded, and avoided except in the most open and superficial fashion. But this was a man of another world. She had met none like him. He roused her and soothed her as none of those others ever had done, as no man before had ever done. She had seen men as good-looking, perhaps, but in a very different way. Would they have looked as well, stripped of their trappings? She doubted it. And never a man among them could or would, she was sure, have handled these obdurate barrels and boxes as this man did. Truly they seemed to object to removal from their lodging-places as though they were endowed with minds of their own. And she had trusted him implicitly, from the first moment she had looked into his eyes, and recognised that it must be he who had drawn her back out of the closing hand of death. "Better put that on," said Wulfrey, dropping one of the coats over her shoulders, when they had got everything aboard. "Why? I am quite warm." "We have done our work now till we get to the spit. No good chilling in the wind. We're going to sail home," and he slipped on the other jacket, and proceeded to rig up a sail and a steering plank as he had seen the mate do. The Girl broke into a laugh at the change for the worse produced in their appearance by the jackets. "You looked like a Greek or a Roman before," she said. "Now we both look like gipsy tinkers." "Fine feathers--fine birds?" he smiled, as they hauled out past the end of the pile and began lumbering slowly homewards. "Those awful birds!" and she glanced anxiously round for them, but they were busy a mile away and troubled them no more. XXXIII The Girl was glad enough of her old coat before they reached the spit, in spite of its demoralising effect on her appearance,--glad even to snuggle down among the blankets, for, after the hard work of loading, even the south-west wind began presently to feel cool. Then came the discharging, and the transporting of their heavy weights to the smaller raft on the lake, which could not take more than half their cargo at a time. So he took her and a portion across to the 'Martha,' and she undertook to have supper ready by the time he got back with the rest. And surely she wrought pleasanter thoughts even than usual into her cooking that day, for it seemed to him, when in due course he sat opposite to her on the other side of their fire, that he had never enjoyed a meal so much in his life, deficient as it was in many things that he had always regarded as needful.