Mr. Richard Saunders stood gazing up at me with the eager wistful expression that is somewhat common in dwarfs. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask the poor little chap if he had ever been in love; but he was a man whose sensitiveness and tenderness of heart obliged one to think twice before speaking. ‘Ay, Mr. Saunders. A noble woman indeed, as you say,’ I answered as softly as he had spoken. ‘But how pale is her cheek! It makes you think of the white death that Helena speaks of in “All’s Well that Ends Well.”’ ‘What Hemmeridge would term chlorosis,’ said he. ‘No, sir; she is perfectly healthy. It is a very uncommon complexion indeed, and very fit for a throne or some high place from which a woman needs to gaze imperiously and with a countenance that must not change colour.’ ‘She looks to have been born to something higher than she is likely to attain,’ said I, watching her with eyes I found it impossible to withdraw. ‘A pity there did not go a little more womanhood to her composition. She might make a fine actress, and do very well in the unrealities of life; but I should say there is but small heart there, Mr. Saunders, with just the same amount of pride that sent Lucifer flaming headlong to----’ Some one coughed immediately behind me. I looked round and met Mrs. Radcliffe’s gaze full. She was seated on a hencoop; but whether she was there when I came to a stand to view Miss Temple, or had arrived unobserved by me, I could not tell. I felt the blood rise in scarlet to my brow, and walked right away forward on the forecastle, greatly, I doubt not, to the astonishment of little Saunders, who, I believe, was in the act of addressing me when I bolted. I went into the head of the ship and leaned against the slope of the giant bowsprit as it came in the towering steeve of those days, to the topgallant-forecastle deck, through which it vanished like the lopped trunk of a titan oak whose roots go deep. The ping of a pistol report caught my ear. There was a sound of the splintering of glass at the yard-arm, along with some hand-clapping on the poop, as though the passengers regarded this shooting at a mark as an entertainment designed for their amusement. Far out ahead of me, jockeying the jib-boom, sat a sailor at work on the stay there; his figure stooped and soared with the lift of the long spar that pointed like the ship’s outstretched finger to the shining azure distance into which she was sailing, and he sang a song to himself in hoarse low notes, that to my mind put a better music to the flowing satin-like heavings of the darkly blue water under him than any mortal musician that I can think of could have married the picture to. There were a few seamen occupied on various jobs about the forecastle. The square of the hatch called the scuttle, lay dark in the deck, and rising up through it, I could hear the grumbling notes of a sailor apparently reading aloud to one of his mates.