He dropped on a stool, bowed his powerful neck whose nape was red, and with his hands stitched the air, ludicrous, sublimely imbecile and comprehensible.

And now he couldn’t have her?  No!  That was too much.  After thinking too that . . .  What had he done?  What was my advice?  Take her by force?  No?  Mustn’t he?  Who was there then to kill him?  For the first time I saw one of his features move; a fighting teeth-baring curl of the lip. . . .  “Not Hermann, perhaps.”  He lost himself in thought as though he had fallen out of the world.

I may note that the idea of suicide apparently did not enter his head for a single moment.  It occurred to me to ask: 

“Where was it that this shipwreck of yours took place?”

“Down south,” he said vaguely with a start.

“You are not down south now,” I said.  “Violence won’t do.  They would take her away from you in no time.  And what was the name of the ship?”

“Borgmester Dahl,” he said.  “It was no shipwreck.”

He seemed to be waking up by degrees from that trance, and waking up calmed.

“Not a shipwreck?  What was it?”

“Break down,” he answered, looking more like himself every moment.  By this only I learned that it was a steamer.  I had till then supposed they had been starving in boats or on a raft—­or perhaps on a barren rock.

“She did not sink then?” I asked in surprise.  He nodded.  “We sighted the southern ice,” he pronounced dreamily.

“And you alone survived?”

He sat down.  “Yes.  It was a terrible misfortune for me.  Everything went wrong.  All the men went wrong.  I survived.”

Remembering the things one reads of it was difficult to realise the true meaning of his answers.  I ought to have seen at once—­but I did not; so difficult is it for our minds, remembering so much, instructed so much, informed of so much, to get in touch with the real actuality at our elbow.  And with my head full of preconceived notions as to how a case of “cannibalism and suffering at sea” should be managed I said—­“You were then so lucky in the drawing of lots?”

“Drawing of lots?” he said.  “What lots?  Do you think I would have allowed my life to go for the drawing of lots?”

Not if he could help if, I perceived, no matter what other life went.

“It was a great misfortune.  Terrible.  Awful,” he said.  “Many heads went wrong, but the best men would live.”

“The toughest, you mean,” I said.  He considered the word.  Perhaps it was strange to him, though his English was so good.

“Yes,” he asserted at last.  “The best.  It was everybody for himself at last and the ship open to all.”

Thus from question to question I got the whole story.  I fancy it was the only way I could that night have stood by him.  Outwardly at least he was himself again; the first sign of it was the return of that incongruous trick he had of drawing both his hands down his face—­and it had its meaning now, with that slight shudder of the frame and the passionate anguish of these hands uncovering a hungry immovable face, the wide pupils of the intent, silent, fascinating eyes.