"You judge yourself too hardly. He asked too much." "It should not have been too much. I ought to have been able to help him. At least ... I ought not to have sent him away as I did." "Assuming it were not too late, do you think you could help him now?" "But it _is_ too late." She was evading the question. "It is not the view I take myself. I saw both doctors yesterday, and they have very little hope of a recovery. But you and I are not bound to agree with them." "What can we do ... in the face of such an opinion?" "We can have faith." "But the doctors?" "It is a purely mental case. The mind is the key of the whole matter." "Yes, I know ... I know." "No doctor, however expert, can ever say anything positively in regard to the mind, provided the brain is not damaged." "Isn't it bound to be?" "They do not say that ... and there is our hope. It is a special case. We must always remember this man is different from other people. It is my firm belief that it is in your power to save him. The view may be entirely mistaken, but it is my own personal conviction." A new Edward Ambrose was speaking. Here were a strength and a force which until that moment he had not known how to show her. It may have been that the occasion had never arisen, or perhaps the conventional timidity of his kind had never permitted it. "I--I don't altogether understand," she said, faintly. "You took away his belief. And I ask you to give it him back again." She walked dully by his side, striving as well as she could to represent to herself the strange words he had used in a form she could accept. "You do understand, Mary?" "Isn't it too late?" Tormenting fears were again upon her. "It may be. Certainly the doctors think the balance of probability against it. But I firmly hold that such a view is not for those who know this poor sailorman. I cannot help thinking that no one is allowed to get so far along the road in the face of such paralyzing odds without there being still some hope of putting the thing through." They stood in the middle of the road, looking at each other. "I ... I think you are right. You understand him so much better than I." "That we can neither of us believe." He spoke with a queer laugh. "But if I am asking you to give too much, you mustn't blame me. You have always taught me to ask too much." His voice tailed off in the oddest way. "But this time I don't ask for myself." She was crying. "I was never the woman that you thought me. Or that I thought myself." She stood a moment, the tears running down her cheeks. "You must go to that poor mariner," he said, with odd suddenness, trying now for the first time in all the long years to impose his will upon hers. "He has a very wonderful cargo on board. You and I--we owe it to each other and perhaps to future generations--to see that it comes into port." Such a tone was startling. She had never heard it before. A new and very potent voice was speaking.