‘I hope you don’t hate me,’ I cried, laughingly. ‘Oh no, not quite. You’re a Londoner, you see.’ This was very severe. I confess I was hardly prepared for it, and I was tempted to say something cutting in reply, but checked myself, bowed, and merely remarked: ‘Which is not my fault. Therefore pity me rather than blame me.’ ‘Certainly I do that,’ she replied, with an amusing seriousness. ‘But look here; answer me this. Why should you have been rude last night when I said what I did about the captain?’ ‘Madame,’ I said, as I laid my hand on my heart and bowed, ‘believe me I had no intention of being rude; but the fact is, I am a somewhat commonplace, matter-of-fact man, and I have no belief in anything that is said to be due to supernatural causes.’ ‘Supernatural or not supernatural,’ she retorted, ‘there are things going on around us which certainly cannot be explained by any known laws.’ ‘Possibly, and yet I doubt it,’ I replied, with a sceptical smile. ‘Well, your obtuseness is your own affair,’ she said, with a shrug of her shoulders; ‘but now, look here, Mr. Gibling, permit me to make a little prophecy. Captain Tredegar has something awful on his mind. He sees visions, and will ultimately go mad.’ Her words startled me. For the first time I was inclined to regard her seriously, in one respect at least; that was the ultimate madness of the skipper. That thought had haunted me, but I had tried to put it away. Even to my somewhat dulled perception it had been made evident that a man who could act as Tredegar had acted on the previous night was a victim to some obscure form of mental disease which might ultimately destroy him. Now the lady spoke with such an absence of vagueness, such a cocksureness, that I asked her if she had known the captain long, and if she was acquainted with his past history. ‘Indeed, no,’ she exclaimed. ‘I never saw the man in my life until I joined the ship in Liverpool.’ ‘Then why do you speak with such an air of self-conviction?’ ‘I speak as I think. I think as I know.’ ‘But how do you know?’ ‘Well, you are stupid,’ she exclaimed, with a show of exasperation. ‘I know, because I have a sense you don’t possess. You are a soot-sodden Londoner. I was born where the sun shines. I have beliefs, you have not. I believe that men who do evil in this world can be haunted into madness by the disembodied spirits of those they injure. Now you may laugh and sneer as much as you like, sir, but I tell you this: when Captain Tredegar came down to the cabin last night his face clearly indicated that he had been terrified by something not human, and I saw madness written large in his eyes.’