He came back in a minute, empty-handed and disconsolate. "I just remembered my fish. I left two up there for breakfast, but the birds have had them. They're as thick on the deck as bees on a comb, hoping for more." "Is that all? I was afraid that man was coming and you'd heard him." "It means living on pork till the storm passes." "That is nothing. We shall enjoy the other things all the more later on." "I'm wondering all the time how Macro is getting on----" he said, pulling out his pipe and filling it. "Why trouble about him? He would not trouble about us if we were starving." "I don't suppose he would.... I suppose it comes of my being so in the habit of helping people through their bodily troubles." "It is wasted on him. He would not let you help him if you could." "I don't believe he would, unless he were helpless.... I wish he'd never come ashore." "But in that case I would not be here either, and you would have been all alone for the rest of your life." "Then, after all, I'm glad he came ashore." "I wonder if you would have gone mad in time with the loneliness of it," she said musingly. "It would be horrible to be all alone for all the rest of one's life, but I don't think I would have gone mad. I've no doubt there are books to be found among the wreckage out there. Still ... for the rest of one's life!"--and he shook his head doubtfully. "As things are, however...." "As things are?" she queried, after waiting for him to finish. "As things are, I am quite content to stop here for the rest of my life, if that has to be. But that won't stop my doing my best to get away if the chance offers.... And you?" "If we were delivered from that man I could be content here also.... But I do not say for all my life. That sounds terribly long.... But for that man it would be a welcome retreat from a world of which I had had a surfeit." He wondered much if she were heart-whole. It seemed almost incredible to him that she could have lived that strange life of hers without some man wanting and touching it. So fair a prize, to go wholly unclaimed and undesired! But never, in all her talk, had she said one word that pointed to anything of the kind. Rather had she held up the men she had met to derogation and contempt. Surely, if there had been anyone to whom her heart turned and clung, some evidence of it would have shown itself. From all she had said, from all her little unconscious self-revelations, and the wholesome judgment he had formed of her in his own mind, he could well believe that, in that whirlpool of a world in which she had lived, she had come to hold most men in doubt and all at arm's length. And the thought was agreeable to him.