“Ya, mynherr.”

“What is this for?  What do you mean to imply?” cried out Jasper; then bit his lip.  “It’s monstrous!” he muttered.

Heemskirk raised for a moment a heavy, as if suffering, glance.

“You may go,” he said to his gunner.  The fat man saluted, and departed.

During the next thirty hours the steady towing was interrupted once.  At a signal from the brig, made by waving a flag on the forecastle, the gunboat was stopped.  The badly-stuffed specimen of a warrant-officer, getting into his boat, arrived on board the Neptun and hurried straight into his commander’s cabin, his excitement at something he had to communicate being betrayed by the blinking of his small eyes.  These two were closeted together for some time, while Jasper at the taffrail tried to make out if anything out of the common had occurred on board the brig.

But nothing seemed to be amiss on board.  However, he kept a look-out for the gunner; and, though he had avoided speaking to anybody since he had finished with Heemskirk, he stopped that man when he came out on deck again to ask how his mate was.

“He was feeling not very well when I left,” he explained.

The fat warrant-officer, holding himself as though the effort of carrying his big stomach in front of him demanded a rigid carriage, understood with difficulty.  Not a single one of his features showed the slightest animation, but his little eyes blinked rapidly at last.

“Oh, ya!  The mate.  Ya, ya!  He is very well.  But, mein Gott, he is one very funny man!”

Jasper could get no explanation of that remark, because the Dutchman got into the boat hurriedly, and went back on board the brig.  But he consoled himself with the thought that very soon all this unpleasant and rather absurd experience would be over.  The roadstead of Makassar was in sight already.  Heemskirk passed by him going on the bridge.  For the first time the lieutenant looked at Jasper with marked intention; and the strange roll of his eyes was so funny—­it had been long agreed by Jasper and Freya that the lieutenant was funny—­so ecstatically gratified, as though he were rolling a tasty morsel on his tongue, that Jasper could not help a broad smile.  And then he turned to his brig again.

To see her, his cherished possession, animated by something of his Freya’s soul, the only foothold of two lives on the wide earth, the security of his passion, the companion of adventure, the power to snatch the calm, adorable Freya to his breast, and carry her off to the end of the world; to see this beautiful thing embodying worthily his pride and his love, to see her captive at the end of a tow-rope was not indeed a pleasant experience.  It had something nightmarish in it, as, for instance, the dream of a wild sea-bird loaded with chains.

Yet what else could he want to look at?  Her beauty would sometimes come to his heart with the force of a spell, so that he would forget where he was.  And, besides, that sense of superiority which the certitude of being loved gives to a young man, that illusion of being set above the Fates by a tender look in a woman’s eyes, helped him, the first shock over, to go through these experiences with an amused self-confidence.  For what evil could touch the elect of Freya?