“Oh, yes,” I said bitterly.  “Let the breakfast wait, sweep up every bit of it, and then throw the damned lot overboard!”

The profound silence returned, and when I looked over my shoulder, Ransome—­the intelligent, serene Ransome—­had vanished from my side.  The intense loneliness of the sea acted like poison on my brain.  When I turned my eyes to the ship, I had a morbid vision of her as a floating grave.  Who hasn’t heard of ships found floating, haphazard, with their crews all dead?  I looked at the seaman at the helm, I had an impulse to speak to him, and, indeed, his face took on an expectant cast as if he had guessed my intention.  But in the end I went below, thinking I would be alone with the greatness of my trouble for a little while.  But through his open door Mr. Burns saw me come down, and addressed me grumpily:  “Well, sir?”

I went in.  “It isn’t well at all,” I said.

Mr. Burns, reestablished in his bed-place, was concealing his hirsute cheek in the palm of his hand.

“That confounded fellow has taken away the scissors from me,” were the next words he said.

The tension I was suffering from was so great that it was perhaps just as well that Mr. Burns had started on his grievance.  He seemed very sore about it and grumbled, “Does he think I am mad, or what?”

“I don’t think so, Mr. Burns,” I said.  I looked upon him at that moment as a model of self-possession.  I even conceived on that account a sort of admiration for that man, who had (apart from the intense materiality of what was left of his beard) come as near to being a disembodied spirit as any man can do and live.  I noticed the preternatural sharpness of the ridge of his nose, the deep cavities of his temples, and I envied him.  He was so reduced that he would probably die very soon.  Enviable man!  So near extinction—­while I had to bear within me a tumult of suffering vitality, doubt, confusion, self-reproach, and an indefinite reluctance to meet the horrid logic of the situation.  I could not help muttering:  “I feel as if I were going mad myself.”

Mr. Burns glared spectrally, but otherwise wonderfully composed.

“I always thought he would play us some deadly trick,” he said, with a peculiar emphasis on the He.

It gave me a mental shock, but I had neither the mind, nor the heart, nor the spirit to argue with him.  My form of sickness was indifference.  The creeping paralysis of a hopeless outlook.  So I only gazed at him.  Mr. Burns broke into further speech.

“Eh!  What!  No!  You won’t believe it?  Well, how do you account for this?  How do you think it could have happened?”

“Happened?” I repeated dully.  “Why, yes, how in the name of the infernal powers did this thing happen?”

Indeed, on thinking it out, it seemed incomprehensible that it should just be like this:  the bottles emptied, refilled, rewrapped, and replaced.  A sort of plot, a sinister attempt to deceive, a thing resembling sly vengeance, but for what?  Or else a fiendish joke.  But Mr. Burns was in possession of a theory.  It was simple, and he uttered it solemnly in a hollow voice.