“The Apse Family had, as you observed, a house on her poop . . .”

“A big, ugly white thing, sticking up,” Jermyn murmured, sadly, at the fire.

“That’s it:  a companion for the cabin stairs and a sort of chart-room combined.  The rain drove in gusts on the sleepy Wilmot.  The ship was then surging slowly to the southward, close hauled, with the coast within three miles or so to windward.  There was nothing to look out for in that part of the gulf, and Wilmot went round to dodge the squalls under the lee of that chart-room, whose door on that side was open.  The night was black, like a barrel of coal-tar.  And then he heard a woman’s voice whispering to him.

“That confounded green-eyed girl of the Pamphilius people had put the kids to bed a long time ago, of course, but it seems couldn’t get to sleep herself.  She heard eight bells struck, and the chief mate come below to turn in.  She waited a bit, then got into her dressing-gown and stole across the empty saloon and up the stairs into the chart-room.  She sat down on the settee near the open door to cool herself, I daresay.

“I suppose when she whispered to Wilmot it was as if somebody had struck a match in the fellow’s brain.  I don’t know how it was they had got so very thick.  I fancy he had met her ashore a few times before.  I couldn’t make it out, because, when telling the story, Wilmot would break off to swear something awful at every second word.  We had met on the quay in Sydney, and he had an apron of sacking up to his chin, a big whip in his hand.  A wagon-driver.  Glad to do anything not to starve.  That’s what he had come down to.

“However, there he was, with his head inside the door, on the girl’s shoulder as likely as not—­officer of the watch!  The helmsman, on giving his evidence afterwards, said that he shouted several times that the binnacle lamp had gone out.  It didn’t matter to him, because his orders were to ‘sail her close.’  ‘I thought it funny,’ he said, ’that the ship should keep on falling off in squalls, but I luffed her up every time as close as I was able.  It was so dark I couldn’t see my hand before my face, and the rain came in bucketfuls on my head.’

“The truth was that at every squall the wind hauled aft a little, till gradually the ship came to be heading straight for the coast, without a single soul in her being aware of it.  Wilmot himself confessed that he had not been near the standard compass for an hour.  He might well have confessed!  The first thing he knew was the man on the look-out shouting blue murder forward there.

“He tore his neck free, he says, and yelled back at him:  ’What do you say?’

“‘I think I hear breakers ahead, sir,’ howled the man, and came rushing aft with the rest of the watch, in the ’awfullest blinding deluge that ever fell from the sky,’ Wilmot says.  For a second or so he was so scared and bewildered that he could not remember on which side of the gulf the ship was.  He wasn’t a good officer, but he was a seaman all the same.  He pulled himself together in a second, and the right orders sprang to his lips without thinking.  They were to hard up with the helm and shiver the main and mizzen-topsails.