And when he came to the end he said: 

“His lordship, the chairman, has said something about the good effects of the solitudes of Nature on a man’s character.  I can testify to that.  And I tell you this—­whatever you are when you’re up here and have everything you want, it’s wonderful strange the way you’re asking the Lord to stretch out His hand and help you when you’re down there, all alone and with an empty hungry stomach.

“I don’t know where you were last Christmas Day, shipmates . . .  I mean gentlemen, but I know where I was.  I was in the 85th latitude, longitude 163, four miles south and thirty west of Mount Darwin.  It was my own bit of an expedition that my commander has made too much of, and I believe in my heart my mates had had enough of it.  When we got out of our sleeping bags that morning there was nothing in sight but miles and miles of rolling waves of snow, seven thousand feet up on a windy plateau, with glaciers full of crevasses shutting us off from the sea, and not a living thing in sight as far as the eye could reach.

“We were six in company and none of us were too good for Paradise, and one—­he was an old Wapping sailor, we called him Treacle—­had the name of being a shocking old rip ashore.  But we remembered what day it was, and we wanted to feel that we weren’t cut off entirely from the world of Christian men—­our brothers and sisters who would be going to church at home.  So I dug out my little prayer-book that my mother put in my kit going away, and we all stood round bare-headed in the snow—­a shaggy old lot I can tell you, with chins that hadn’t seen a razor for a month—­and I read the prayers for the day, the first and second Vespers, and Laudate Dominum and then the De Profundis.

“I think we felt better doing that, but they say the comical and the tragical are always chasing each other, which can get in first, and it was so with us, for just as I had got to an end with the solemn words, ‘Out of the depths we cry unto thee, O Lord, Lord hear our cry,’ in jumps old Treacle in his thickest cockney, ’And Gawd bless our pore ole wives and sweethearts fur a-wye.’”

If Martin said any more nobody heard it.  The men below were blowing their noses, and the women in the gallery were crying openly.

“Well, the man who can talk like that may open all my letters and telegrams,” said one of the young American women, who was wiping her eyes without shame.

What I was doing, and what I was looking like, I did not know until the lady, who had lent me the opera-glasses leaned over to me and said: 

“Excuse me, but are you his wife, may I ask?”

“Oh no, no,” I said nervously and eagerly, but only God knows how the word went through and through me.

I had taken the wrong course, and I knew it.  My pride, my joy, my happiness were all accusing me, and when I went to bed that night I felt as if I had been a guilty woman.