"I am very dull and lonely," he said in a musing way, clearly inattentive to her words. "Those ships yonder break the continuity of this everlasting circle, but they'll vanish shortly, and the full desolation of the night will encompass us. It is the night that I fear--it is the night that I fear!" he continued, almost whispering, and gazing at her as a man looks at another whose pity and help his heart is yearning for. "I miss him! If I dream of him I shall go mad to find it a dream. But you know where he is." She hoped to divert his thoughts, and said: "I do not find the sea desolate, Captain Layard. On fine nights I could stand for hours looking at the stars; and is desolation on the sea when the sun is shining? If I were a man I would be a sailor, for, although it has nearly destroyed me, I have learnt to love the ocean." She looked toward Hardy. The dog, having barked his report of two sail in sight, came trotting aft, and stood beside his master. The captain looked at him a little while in silence, his brow contracted in meditation. "Which is real?" he asked, placing his foot upon the dog's shadow, "this or this?" and he put his hand upon the dog. Julia, who found a necessity to humour him, answered: "Some great thinker has written, 'Shadows we are, and shadows we pursue.'" "How long grows one's shadow in the dying sun!" said Captain Layard, turning his face--filled with the yearning of grief and charged with that subtle expression of madness for which no words are to be found--toward the burning sky; "and soon we are nothing but shadows. Do you believe in God?" He looked at her suddenly with an extraordinary gaze of passionate anxiety. "Oh, yes, Captain Layard," replied the girl. "I believe in him now if ever I did, and I have thanked him." His face put on its triumphant look, but he was interrupted in the irrelevant sentiments he was about to deliver by the approach of the boatswain. Julia crossed the deck to Hardy, glad to escape the pain of such talk. "What is it?" said the captain. "The men we picked up," answered the boatswain, "have asked me to come aft to say they're willing to serve as seamen aboard this ship." "You are a full company," replied the captain, quickly. "I can't afford to pay and keep more sailors." "They're likely men, sir," said the boatswain, speaking in a softened note of respectful compassion. "They'll expect their wages." The boatswain answered he thought that was likely. "No," said the captain, "we'll transship them, and send them home."