She had a double interest in him now—­her interest in the man whose protecting care had saved her reason and her life; her interest in the man whose heart’s deepest secret she had surprised.  Little by little they grew as easy and familiar with each other as old friends; little by little she presumed on all her privileges, and wound her way unsuspected into the most intimate knowledge of his nature.

Her questions were endless.  Everything that he could tell her of himself and his life she drew from him delicately and insensibly:  he, the least self-conscious of mankind, became an egotist in her dexterous hands.  She found out his pride in his ship, and practiced on it without remorse.  She drew him into talking of the fine qualities of the vessel, of the great things the vessel had done in emergencies, as he had never in his life talked yet to any living creature on shore.  She found him out in private seafaring anxieties and unutterable seafaring exultations which he had kept a secret from his own mate.  She watched his kindling face with a delicious sense of triumph in adding fuel to the fire; she trapped him into forgetting all considerations of time and place, and striking as hearty a stroke on the rickety little lodging-house table, in the fervor of his talk, as if his hand had descended on the solid bulwark of his ship.  His confusion at the discovery of his own forgetfulness secretly delighted her; she could have cried with pleasure when he penitently wondered what he could possibly have been thinking of.

At other times she drew him from dwelling on the pleasures of his life, and led him into talking of its perils—­the perils of that jealous mistress the sea, which had absorbed so much of his existence, which had kept him so strangely innocent and ignorant of the world on shore.  Twice he had been shipwrecked.  Times innumerable he and all with him had been threatened with death, and had escaped their doom by the narrowness of a hair-breadth.  He was always unwilling at the outset to speak of this dark and dreadful side of his life:  it was only by adroitly tempting him, by laying little snares for him in his talk, that she lured him into telling her of the terrors of the great deep.  She sat listening to him with a breathless interest, looking at him with a breathless wonder, as those fearful stories—­made doubly vivid by the simple language in which he told them—­fell, one by one, from his lips.  His noble unconsciousness of his own heroism—­the artless modesty with which he described his own acts of dauntless endurance and devoted courage, without an idea that they were anything more than plain acts of duty to which he was bound by the vocation that he followed—­raised him to a place in her estimation so hopelessly high above her that she became uneasy and impatient until she had pulled down the idol again which she herself had set up.  It was on these occasions that she most rigidly exacted from him all those little familiar