Certainly Lucy Woodrow was quite honest to her nature in her attitude towards the young stranger.  She did not dissect her emotions:  she did not even question them.  In becoming her hero Done had levelled all the conventional barriers, and her friendship and concern were sincere.  She had never recurred to the incident of the rescue, feeling that the subject was painful to him, and glad to dwell no further upon an act of her own that of late had become quite inexplicable to her.  Lucy no longer turned her eyes to the wake of the Francis Cadman:  she no longer yearned backward to the land where she had left only a grave.  Her mind was employed with a most serious duty:  she had adopted a mission, and that mission was the regeneration of James Done.  The regeneration was not to be so much religious as moral.  The poor boy’s life was disordered; he had suffered some great wrong; his naturally beautiful, brave, generous disposition was soured; he had lost faith in God and in woman, and it remained for her to restore his belief, to teach him that his fellow-creatures were in the main animated with the most excellent motives, and to drive away all those strange, wild opinions of his, and generally brighten and sweeten his life and turn him out a new man.  She could not have explained how she was going to accomplish all this, but every maiden is at heart a missionary of some sort, and Lucy had a vague idea that the influence of a good woman was always effective in such cases.  She never imagined that the youth would test her pretty, heartfelt opinions and her glowing faith in the rightness of things in the cold, sceptical light of his logic.

‘Women don’t bother themselves much to know if things are true,’ he said.  ‘They’re content with thinking they ought to be true.’

‘Well,’ she answered, ’why not try to be true to the things that ought to be true?’

‘If I wanted to, the world wouldn’t let me.’

’You cannot believe that.  The really good man is always obeyed and reverenced.’

’And has always a fat billet.  Yes; that kind of goodness is an excellent thing as a speculation.’

She thought him wilfully paradoxical, and it came about, when their acquaintanceship was about three weeks old, that while Jim Done, the small and early philosopher, held Lucy in fine disdain as a born fool, his vital humanity discovered strange allurements in her, and her proximity fired a craving in his blood that sometimes tempted him to crush her in his arms and bruise her lips with kisses.  He grew less brusque with her, and showed on occasions a sort of diffident gentleness, and then Lucy was satisfied that her work was progressing.

‘You never talk of your life there in England,’ she said one night as they stood by the mizzen-chains overlooking the sea.  Since the use of the forepart of the ship had been offered him as a privilege, Done religiously abstained from encroaching a foot beyond the steerage limit, although he had previously invaded the sacred reserve on occasion in defiance of authority.