I have been at some pains to set down these impressions closely, for they stood to me for the bitter reckoning I must pay for the quest of Valentine Imroth and the ship he had commanded. Cast out there upon the black ocean, I had been a fool to believe that I merited any particular mercy of the Almighty which would repair my mistakes or pass by my imprudence. That I had escaped into the sea at all now seemed the greater wonder. I could depict the instant of fierce exclamation which had followed upon my plunge, the roar of voices, the loud report of vain pistols. These I had heard with my own ears, and it should have come to me that my own fellows had heard them also. Little good reasoning, however, may be looked for from a man cast down from a high deck into the Atlantic Ocean, and there left to battle with the surges in the shadows of the night. How long it was before the end came I shall never know. I recollect that I had the sense not to swim but merely to keep afloat as near as might be to the scene of my rashness. The intervening moments, as I say, brought me from a state of content to one of despair, and from that again almost to a state of insensibility—and I know only that a great rough hand took me from the sea at last, that white faces bent over me, and that, kindliest of them all, was the face of Joan Fordibras—my little Joan of the Valley House—who stooped and kissed my lips, and with a young girl’s tears expressed the welcome by her heart unspoken. And so love was the Avenger after all—love set above the kingdoms of Death as love shall ever be. CHAPTER XXX. JOAN TELLS HER STORY. _And we are Homeward Bound._ Mr. Bob Sawyer, I believe, expressed his opinion upon a famous occasion that there was no medicine in all the world half so efficacious or so infallible as rum punch—to which axiom he added the rider that if any man had ever failed to derive benefits from this nectar, it was because he had not taken enough of it. Such a doctrine, for my part, I find incontrovertible. There is no cure for an overdose of cold water so swift and certain as the remedy the excellent Robert has prescribed. There is assuredly none so rarely declined or so readily sampled by the patient. I am an exceedingly strong man—and, despite the assertions of my dear sister Harriet, my constitution is of iron. No common exercise tires me; I can walk all day and be the better for my walk at bed-time. I have swum five miles in the sea on two occasions, and defied all the faculty after a wetting more times than I care to remember. If it be foolish to boast overmuch of such a catalogue of physical merits, I set them down here that I may speak of the hours following upon my rescue with that brevity they deserve, and spare the reader any pedantic account of them.