One could see that she was moved.  Life had taken a wider aspect for her.  She doubtless knew of poverty and suffering, but to her they had been abstract things near which her footsteps had never carried her.

“In another year or two it will be deserted,” I told her.  “The few sticks on the island have all been cut down, and they have begun to burn the boards of the abandoned house, though they also get a little driftwood for fuel.  That is the story of many places on this coast, after the people have exhausted the scanty supply of wood.”

She evidently thought it marvelous that such desolate bits of rock should have found human limpets to cling to them and be able to support life after a fashion.  Then she began to look at the man who was lying in the bottom of the boat.  Although he was very pale and weak he looked contentedly at the sky and the fleecy clouds, and when his eyes caught hers he smiled bashfully.  And the instinct then moved her, which lies in every proper feminine heart, however dormantly, to mother something or somebody.

The screaming feathered life no longer interested her, nor the surging of the crested waves against the cliffs, nor the cleaving of the water by our little ship.  She took a step forward and sat down on the rough boards, beside this wreck of manhood we were bringing in, unmindful of the dried fish-scales that would flake off upon her skirts.  It was surely an unconscious movement of hers when her hand went out and rested on the fisherman’s rough paw.

I saw him stare at her, his eyes filled with wonderment and gratitude, for men of these places know little of tender care.

“How do you feel now?” she asked him, gently.

“I feels like I once did after a day an’ a night on th’ ice,” he replied, slowly.  “I mind there wuz four on us to a small pan as had broke loose.  An’ two they give out with th’ cold, an’ wuz dead afore mornin’, but th’ steamer as had lost us in th’ fog she jist sudden loomed up, all ter once, an’ took Tom Pilley an’ me off an’ we wuz saved.  I mistrust that’s jist how I feels again now.”

The girl turned her eyes towards me, and they were moist.  She had understood the man and realized the time he had spent in despairing resignation, with the image of death ever before him during the long battle against cold and starvation.  Then life had come, like a flash, out of the smothering mists, and soon he had been ready to struggle on again.  And it was evident that the dreary prospect of such an existence prolonged was enough to make him happy once more.

After this she remained silent for a long time.  Hitherto, in her existence, sorrow and suffering had appeared like some other wonderful things occurring in nature, such as the forces holding atoms together or compelling bodies to gravitate.  One knew of such things, of course, yet one was unconscious of them.  Now they were assuming an importance she had never realized before.  Her head bent low, as if she were being chastened by some strange feeling of reproach.