“Wait a moment,” said Captain Giles, leaving me suddenly.  I sat down feeling very tired, mostly in my head.  Before I could start a train of thought he stood again before me, murmuring the excuse that he had to go and put the fellow’s mind at ease.

I looked up with surprise.  But in reality I was indifferent.  He explained that he had found the Steward lying face downward on the horsehair sofa.  He was all right now.

“He would not have died of fright,” I said contemptuously.

“No.  But he might have taken an overdose out of one of them little bottles he keeps in his room,” Captain Giles argued seriously.  “The confounded fool has tried to poison himself once—­a few years ago.”

“Really,” I said without emotion.  “He doesn’t seem very fit to live, anyhow.”

“As to that, it may be said of a good many.”

“Don’t exaggerate like this!” I protested, laughing irritably.  “But I wonder what this part of the world would do if you were to leave off looking after it, Captain Giles?  Here you have got me a command and saved the Steward’s life in one afternoon.  Though why you should have taken all that interest in either of us is more than I can understand.”

Captain Giles remained silent for a minute.  Then gravely: 

“He’s not a bad steward really.  He can find a good cook, at any rate.  And, what’s more, he can keep him when found.  I remember the cooks we had here before his time! . . .”

I must have made a movement of impatience, because he interrupted himself with an apology for keeping me yarning there, while no doubt I needed all my time to get ready.

What I really needed was to be alone for a bit.  I seized this opening hastily.  My bedroom was a quiet refuge in an apparently uninhabited wing of the building.  Having absolutely nothing to do (for I had not unpacked my things), I sat down on the bed and abandoned myself to the influences of the hour.  To the unexpected influences. . . .

And first I wondered at my state of mind.  Why was I not more surprised?  Why?  Here I was, invested with a command in the twinkling of an eye, not in the common course of human affairs, but more as if by enchantment.  I ought to have been lost in astonishment.  But I wasn’t.  I was very much like people in fairy tales.  Nothing ever astonishes them.  When a fully appointed gala coach is produced out of a pumpkin to take her to a ball, Cinderella does not exclaim.  She gets in quietly and drives away to her high fortune.

Captain Ellis (a fierce sort of fairy) had produced a command out of a drawer almost as unexpectedly as in a fairy tale.  But a command is an abstract idea, and it seemed a sort of “lesser marvel” till it flashed upon me that it involved the concrete existence of a ship.

A ship!  My ship!  She was mine, more absolutely mine for possession and care than anything in the world; an object of responsibility and devotion.  She was there waiting for me, spell-bound, unable to move, to live, to get out into the world (till I came), like an enchanted princess.  Her call had come to me as if from the clouds.  I had never suspected her existence.  I didn’t know how she looked, I had barely heard her name, and yet we were indissolubly united for a certain portion of our future, to sink or swim together!