'But we must not starve, father,' she answered: 'let us first breakfast, as best we can, and then I will go below.' She left the cabin and promptly returned, bringing with her the remains of the cold meat we had supped off, some biscuit, and a bottle of red wine. Her father drank a little of the wine and ate a morsel of biscuit; indeed, food seemed to excite a loathing in him. I saw that Helga eyed him piteously, but she did not press him to eat: it might be that she had experience of his stubbornness. She said, in a soft aside, to me: 'His appetite is leaving him, and how can I tempt him without the means of cooking? Does not he look very ill this morning?' 'It is worry, added to rheumatic pains,' said I: 'we must get him ashore as soon as possible, where he can be nursed in comfort.' But though these words flowed readily, out of my sympathy with the poor, brave, suffering girl, they were assuredly not in correspondence with my secret feelings. It was not only I was certain that Captain Nielsen lay in his cot a dying man; the roaring of the wind, the beating of the sea against the barque, the wild extravagant leapings and divings, the perception that water was draining into the hold, and that there were but two of us--and one of those two a girl--to work the pumps, made a mockery to my heart of my reference to the Captain getting ashore and being nursed there. We sat in that slanting and leaping interior with plates on our knees. The girl feigned to eat; her head drooped with weariness, yet I noticed that she would force a cheerful note into the replies she made to her father's ceaseless feverish questions. When we had ended our meal, she left us to go below to her cabin; but before leaving she asked me, with eyes full of tender pleading, to keep her father's heart up, to make the best of such reports as I might have to give him after going out to take a look round; and she told me that he would need his physic at such and such a time, and so lingered, dwelling upon him and glancing at him; and then she went out in a hurry with one hand upon her breast, yet not so swiftly but that I could see her eyes were swimming. 'There is a barometer in the cabin,' said Captain Nielsen; 'will you tell me how the mercury stands?' The glass was fixed to the bulkhead outside. I returned and gave him the reading. ''Tis a little rise!' he cried, with his unnaturally bright eyes eagerly fastened upon me. I would not tell him that it was not so--that the mercury, indeed, stood at the level I had observed on the preceding day in my glass in the lifeboat house. 'Fierce weather of this sort,' said I, 'soon exhausts itself.' He continued to stare at me, but now with an air of musing that somewhat softened the painful brilliant intentness of his regard.