This I heard with one ear.  At the same time my other ear was getting filled with different kind of talk.  Aye, my post was between two conversations, and I found myself eavesdropping in two directions.

This wall I hugged was the forward wall of the sail-locker, which, in the Golden Bough, was a large room in the cabin space, and as I stood, my starboard ear was but a few inches distant from the sail-locker door.  This door was in two parts, and the upper half was barely ajar.  Through this narrow slit I heard—­I couldn’t help hearing—­the murmur of low-voiced talk.  Two people were in the sail-locker, talking.  Oh, aye, I had discovered Newman.  I recognized his voice.  I recognized the other voice—­the lady’s voice.

“Oh, Mary—­little love—­it doesn’t seem to matter any more.  When I am with you, it is just a hideous dream from which I have awakened.”  It was Newman speaking, and in a voice so tender, so vibrant with feeling, it was hard to believe the words came out of the mouth of the foc’sle’s iron man.  “But now I wish to live again.  Ah, little love, I have been dead too long, dead to everything except pain and hate.  But now that I know, now that we both know—­oh, Mary, surely we have earned the right to live and love.  God will not hold it against us, if I take you from that mad beast.  God—­I am beginning to believe in God again, Mary, when I am with you.”

“I, too, wish to live—­and in clean air,” came in the lady’s voice.  “Oh, Roy—­five years—­and the piling up of horrors—­oh, I could not have stood it very much longer, Roy.  But now—­we can forget.”

“That lad for’ard is all ready to slip his cable,” came from the other direction, from Chips.  “The steward says he’s all set to go.”

“He’s been all set for a fortnight,” was the other man’s comment, “but he hangs on.  Takes a lot to kill a squarehead.  Most likely he’ll be hanging on when we make port.”

“Not if I know Fitz and—­him,” said Chips.  “You don’t think they’d leave evidence of that sort for a port doctor to squint at.  Remember that Portagee, last voyage, and how he finished?”

“Aye, it was hard on the lady, that job was.  But he—­he’s a devil, sure.  No use standing out against him.”

“Five years!  My God, how have you been able to stand it, Mary?” said Newman.  “Five years—­and most of them spent at sea in this blood ship!”

“It has been my penance, Roy.  It has seemed to me that in sailing with him, in lessening even a little bit the misery he causes those poor men, I have been atoning, in a little measure, for my lack of faith in you.  Oh, it was my fault in the beginning, dearest.  If only I had had faith in the beginning, if only I had trusted my heart instead of my eyes and ears.  I might have known that time that Beulah was lying.”

“Hush.  How could you know?  It was my stubborn, stupid pride.  If I had not rushed away and left the field to him.  And I never knew, or even guessed, until Beasley told me.”