“Let me do it,” she said.  “It would be fun.”

“I’m damned—­Oh, I beg your pardon, old girl!—­but I’m hanged if I’ll not make my hand steady.  I’ll do it, I tell you!  If I cut myself in bits, serve me right!  I’ll be half an hour and then—­then—­well, wait!”

She heard him in his cabin, whistling as he dragged out his trunk, pushed it back roughly, dropped and smashed a tumbler and then rushed along the alley-way.  After awhile she heard him come back, heard the sound of violent brushing, heard him kick things and swear, drop things, bundle things about.  She sat down on her trunk suddenly weak as she realized what she had done.  She had never thought of being married before; marriage seemed a thing for elderly people; there seemed something ungallant, something a little dragging about marriage that rather frightened her.  Her mother’s marriage, she was beginning to understand, had been a thing of horror.  She thought of those stifled cries in the night at the old farm, cries that she had thought meant that ghosts were walking; she heard with terrible distinctness the voice of the Edinburgh specialist as he said, “In my opinion the injury was caused by a blow—­a blow, Mr. Lashcairn.”  Then, quite suddenly she laughed.  It was quite amusing to think of Louis’s making anyone ill by a blow.

“He’d never have fought Ole Fred if they hadn’t both been drunk,” she said slowly, staring at the boards of the floor, and her quick imagination showed her the two of them, fighting ignobly, all dust and sweat and ill-aimed blows.  They could only hurt each other because both were too unsteady to dodge futile lungings.  There was nothing of the Berserk about Louis.

Panic came to her.  The things she realized about marriage were that it was irrevocable, and that it meant a frighteningly close proximity; and in that swift vision of Louis’s fight—­even though it had been in defence of her—­she had realized that it was utterly impossible for her to be with him for the rest of her life.

“Oh how could I?  How can I?  How can I be glittering and shining with a man who is always crying?  How can we be—­be conquerors together when I never, never think of him except as ‘poor boy’ or ‘silly idiot’?  Oh no—­no—­I can’t!  I can’t!  Even if I do save him, what is there in that for me?  I want to shine—­I daren’t have hot, dirty, damp hands dragging at me.  I can’t.  I must be free, uncaught—­”

The cabin became a cage; she wanted to push out the strong steel plates and get out into the night:  Louis’s weakness, which had been all his appeal to her, seemed an intolerable infliction, a cruel hoax on the part of fate, just as though, for her shining lover, someone had substituted a changeling stuffed with sawdust.

“I must tell him.  But it’s so cruel of me.  I’m cruel—­but I must tell him.”

In the next cabin he began to sing, rather jerkily, a song everyone on the ship was singing just then.