I should be wanting in common honesty if I failed to say that this woman’s remarks, rude as they were to some extent, put certain rambling thoughts of my own into shape, impressed me in a way that a short time previously I should have been ashamed to own to. They set me pondering, and I tried to recall every act, word, look and gesture of the captain’s, with the result that I had to admit there was something strange about him. At that moment Captain Tredegar himself came on deck, with his sextant in his hand, in order to take the noonday sights for the reckoning. His breezy, jovial manner, and smiling bronzed face, seemed to make the conversation about him ridiculous, and tended to confound the prophet who had talked of madness. He bowed politely to the lady, and chatted to her pleasantly. He greeted me with a cheery ‘Good-morning,’ and expressed a hope that neither of us had been much alarmed by the squall of the previous evening. He said the passage was going to be a splendid one; one of the best he had ever made; and if, as he anticipated we should do, we picked up a good slant of wind when we had made a little more westing, we should reach Cuba several days before the time we were expected. The mate now came on deck also with his sextant, and he and the captain walked to the break of the poop to take the sights. When he was out of earshot I turned to the lady and said: ‘He doesn’t look much like a man who is given to seeing visions and is doomed to madness, does he?’ ‘You cannot see beneath the mask,’ she replied, with another contemptuous curl of her lip, and laying great stress on the ‘you’; and she added somewhat mysteriously, ‘Wait, wait, wait,’ repeating the word three times, with a rising inflection on each repetition. Then she turned to her book again, as if she wished me to understand that she had said her say and would say no more. I took the hint, and making a show of stretching my limbs, I rose and began to pace up and down. The subject of the conversation between me and the lady continued to occupy my thoughts against my will and desire, and the more I thought the more like a riddle did the captain appear to me. I was really astonished to find myself taking so much interest in him. A passing interest in one with whom you happen to be a fellow voyager is easily understood. But if Captain Tredegar had been a relative of mine, my own brother, in fact, I could hardly have felt more anxious or more desirous to solve the mystery that seemed to surround him. His appearance that morning, and his appearance and behaviour of the night before, were in such violent contrast that to put it down to the merely varying moods to which we are all liable was not satisfactory enough. What puzzled me more than anything else was his behaviour during the storm. To suppose that he was a coward and lost his nerve in a passing squall was absurd on the face of it. In the very height of the storm he delivered his