The father regarded her fixedly for a moment; then sighed, and said, "I suppose I may as well humor you, for a while at least. We shall take in ballast as soon as she arrives, and go. But what a waste of time!" So the big ship, able to earn an annual dividend of sixteen per cent. of her cost, left Melbourne in ballast, practically in charge of a crazed girl bent on finding a man drowned ten months before. According to accepted standards no alienist would have hesitated in pronouncing her crazed. She slept little, was careless of her personal appearance, and walked the deck aimlessly, occasionally peering at the compass, and looking at the helmsman in a way to make him steer better for a time. She nagged her father when stress of wind compelled the shortening of sail. She took the sun at midday with Bridge's sextant, and took chronometer sights to work out the longitude, sharply criticizing her father for an error of a few seconds in his calculations. She grudged the necessity of reaching south to the forty-fifth parallel to avoid the strong head winds on the fortieth. Night and day she was up, worrying her distracted father and the two mates with questions, comments, and speculations. She pored over the chart, on which was pricked off the ship's position when Bridge had gone overboard, and pricked off herself the daily position as the ship beat her way westward. But it was not till the ship had arrived at the fatal spot, and her father had prepared a series of logical deductions for her consideration, that she showed anything of definiteness in her whims and fancies. She had insisted that they heave the ship to that night, as she did not care to go farther in the darkness, and had lain down to pass the night as she could--not to sleep, she told her father, but to pray to God for light and hope and method. And in an hour she was up. "Father," she said as she awakened the old man in his berth, "we must head south by west, half west. I know the course." "What do you know?" grunted the wearied and conscience stricken man. "Go back to bed, and let me sleep! Sleep yourself! Let me alone, or I'll be as mad as you are!" She got out the chart and spread it on the cabin table. Then, with her eyes gleaming with the concentrated stare of the insane, she traced out the drift of the ship since the last plotting, and from the point reached drew a line south by west, half west. It struck a large, irregular island, and she read its name, Desolation Island. She went on deck, disheveled and careless, her hair flying in the wind, and asked the officer of the watch to heave the log and give her the best of his judgment as to the ship's drift through the night. Then she went back to her berth, and did not appear until daylight, when she came up and again interviewed the officer in charge.