Again and again she had expressed the joy she had felt at the prospect of her escape to a freer and larger life. It was, of course, not impossible that that feeling might but hide some heart-breaking disappointment of the earlier times. But he did not think so. She was to him truth personified, though still a woman. He believed in her absolutely, as a man should in the woman who holds his heart. So far as assurance could go,--without the definite question which he longed to put but did not yet dare, lest the hopeful anxiety of his present state should be turned to hopeless regret,--he felt fairly safe in building on a rosy future. How she regarded himself he could not surely say. But she trusted him and that was a good foundation for his building. And she? Well, that is our story! XLVI That thick white bank of mist clung to them for the best part of a week. But, freed from all fear of treacherous assault, it troubled them little. Once they had to go ashore for water, but got back safely by means of their guiding-line, and as they pushed through the fog they recalled that former time, when the mate's grim figure fashioned itself suddenly out of the clammy whiteness and brought them near to a disastrous end. For the rest they had no scarcity. The fish bit as well in the fog as in the clear, and they had pork and flour for weeks to come. In their narrow confinement to the ship, their intimacy and knowledge of one another grew with the days. She talked well, and he was an excellent listener, and led her on and on to tell him of the past and all that had interested her in it, and mused on all she said, and sought in it enlightenment as to her heart's freedom or otherwise. Once, when she had been roving at length through her earlier days, she broke off suddenly with, "But, mon Dieu, I am doing all the talking! Now, tell me of yourself!" "I have so little to tell compared with you. Shall I tell you of school-days--of college--of the hospitals--of my patients and their ailments?" "Tell me why you left it all to seek the new life." "For very much the same reason as you did, I imagine. I was living in a groove and I wanted something wider and larger." "And now you are sorry." "So very sorry that if I had the chance again, and knew beforehand all that was to come, I would jump at it like the fish to our hooks," as he hauled one aboard and knocked it an the head. "And you?" "Ye--es, I think I would have come also. Not perhaps if I had known I would have to float about on that mast. It was so terribly cold,"--with a shiver. "For the rest, I have no regrets, but it is perhaps too soon to say. In ten years hence I may have come to be sorry." "Ay--ten years hence!" he said musingly. "Many things may happen in ten years. There's a fish on your hook," and she hauled it in and let him dispose of it.