I was propped up in an easy chair. Up to two days back I had been on a cot. Mr. Cunningham had improved so rapidly that for more than a week now he had been allowed on deck, and there he was now, as I said, listening with his daughter to the tales of Captain Blaise. His laughter and her breaths of suspense, I could hear the one and feel the other. I took up my pad of paper and resumed my writing. And reviewing my writing, I had to smile at myself, even as I used to smile at Captain Blaise when he would submit his couplets or quatrains for my judgment. He might marshal off-hand a stanza or two of his vagabond thoughts, but here was I carefully composing with pencil and paper, and had been for a week now. I had never been ill before, never for five minutes. And this illness had driven me to a strange introspection. There had been time to think. I smiled at Captain Blaise's amateurish rhymings on the veranda of the manor-house. I had condemned him in my own mind for this death or that death of his irregular career; on that last night on the veranda I had even allowed him to read my thoughts of such matters. And now I could not recollect of his having ever killed or maimed except in defence of his life or property; and yet that night in Momba I had shot, caring not whether I killed or no. Self-defence? At the instant of shooting I had thought, had almost spoken it aloud: "There! There's for a channel to let the starlight into your unclean brain." Self-defence? Tish! The Governor's son desired, possibly loved in his way, a girl that I had known no longer than I knew him, and there it was--I loved her, too! Captain Blaise himself had probably never killed on less provocation; and meditating on his emotional side, on his many provocations, his life-long environment, I had to concede that the Captain Blaise I condemned was a less guilty man than I. This, as I was beginning to see, was but an argument with myself for a final dismissal of my old life. Surely I should be ashamed to admit that in such fashion was my brain trying to fool my soul; but so it was. Remorse? I should have been worn with remorse, I know; but I was not. I tried to grieve for my hasty judgment of Captain Blaise: and I did. But for the Governor's son, not a qualm. I, too, like Captain Blaise, had become the creature of hereditary instincts and overpowering emotion. Never in all my life before had I thought that any sin or shortcoming of mine was ever to be anybody's business but my own. My salvation lay in the future, which, now that my conscience was awakened, I would have only myself to censure if it did not become what I wished.