were placed; and as I glanced at her through the skylight window, I made up my mind to subdue her to my views, to conquer the insolence of her spirit, even should it come to my having to act in a manner that might be deemed brutal, never to humour her by giving her reasons, but to peremptorily insist in such a fashion as to make her perceive that whilst we were thus together, I was her master, and she must instantly acquiesce in my decisions; for unless this was to be managed, her temper, her want of tact, her pettish character as that of a person whose nature had been injured by admiration and indulgence, might end in the destruction of us both. What a midnight watch was that! I was sick at heart, and miserable with misgiving. My distrust of the carpenter, a feeling that had all along possessed me, was strong even to a conviction that he was equal to the acting of a hellish part, and that being free, and at the head, so to speak, of a gang of men, of whom one only—I mean Wetherly—seemed worthy of confidence, he might be presently hatching some plot of deadly menace to Miss Temple and me. I asked myself what form could such a plot take? I knew not: I could but forebode: I could only keep before me the circumstance of a little ship afloat on a wide sea without captain or mates, full to the hatches with commodities of value, a handsome fabric of herself, virtually in the possession of an irresponsible body of men, into whose keeping she had come through the merest effect of fortune, without the least stroke of rascality on their part. I say I had only to consider this, and then to think of the character of the crew as it had been represented to me by Captain Braine, to forebode some action on their part that might extinguish my project of reaching Rio—with so much to follow that I durst not give my mind to speculating upon it. Shocking as had been the suddenness and the unexpectedness of the captain’s suicide, the thing sat lightly as a horror upon my imagination, so profoundly agitated was I by the indeterminable fears that had been raised in me by the few words the carpenter had let fall. I could not be sure; but it seemed to me, by the haze of light which hung about the forecastle hatch, called the forescuttle, and by an occasional stirring of shadows amidst it, as though to the movements of the men below, or to figures coming on deck and descending again, that all hands were awake forward. There should have been nothing to particularly disturb me in this suspicion, for enough lay in the captain’s death to account for the men keeping awake and talking; still, the belief that the sailors were conversing in their gloomy little sea parlour, with Lush’s growling tongue sulkily active amongst them, greatly increased my uneasiness.