After talking a little while together, these two people rose from their chairs and knelt down in prayer. Hardy believed in God and in the mercy of God, and so did Julia, and he asked God in the simple language of the plain English seaman's heart to protect them and be with them, and he thanked him for the mercy he had already vouchsafed; and depend upon it no British sailor will consider this an unnatural act on the part of Hardy, because always the proudest heart of oak in the hour of triumph, the most depressed heart of oak in the hour of trial, has been accustomed to look up to God and thank or beseech him, for it is he who shares the loneliness of the seaman on the wide, wide sea. But let me assure the reader, also, that lovers do not make love in shipwreck as they do under the awning of the passenger liner, or in the bower of roses ashore. Death is too near to allow passion to expend itself in the form made familiar by the novel. Their talk often went to Captain Layard and the amazing cunning he had exhibited in inventing the trap they had all fallen into. "I believe," said Hardy, "only two are dead on board. He had a book to give them the doses, and his brain was clearly equal to understanding what it said. But would the rum absorb all the poison? Would not one man get more than his whack? A few grains more would have done for us all. The beggar took care not to drink himself, and none of us thought of asking him to." "How did you feel when you awoke?" she asked. "Much as you did, I expect," he answered. But talking was not very easy in this interior. The water, sheeting against the deck-house, seethed through speech and confounded it. There was the thunder of the fallen sea forward, and the incommunicable maledictions of a sodden brig in the trough filled the gale with bewilderment as it flew. Every fabric afloat has a voice of her own, and like her sailors, she knows how to swear when injured.