“I do ask it....  Will you?”

“If I wanted to I couldn’t, and I don’t want to.  I prefer this hell to the other.”

“Won’t you make a fight for it?”

“No!” he said brutally.

The girl bent her head again over her knitting.  But her white fingers remained idle.  After a long while, staring at her intently, he saw her lip quiver.

“Don’t do that!” he broke out harshly.  “What the devil do you care?”

Then she lifted her tragic white face.  And he had his answer.

“My God!” he faltered, springing to his feet.  “What’s the matter with you?  Why do you care?  You can’t care!  What is it to you that a drunken beast slinks back into hell again?  Do you think you are Samaritan enough to follow him and try to drag him out by the ears?...  A man whose very brain is already cracking with it all—­a burnt-out thing with neither mind nor manhood left—­”

She got to her feet, trembling and deathly white.

“I can’t let you go,” she whispered.

Exasperation almost strangled him and set afire his unhinged brain.

“For Christ’s sake!” he cried.  “What do you care?”

“I—­I care,” she stammered—­“for Christ’s sake ...  And yours!”

Things went dark before her eyes....  She opened them after a while on the sofa where he had carried her.  He was standing looking down at her. ...  After a long while the ghost of a smile touched her lips.  In his haunted gaze there was no response.  But he said in an altered, unfamiliar voice:  “I’ll go if you say so.  I’ll do all that’s in me to do. ...  Will you be there—­for the first day or two?”

“Yes....  All day long....  Every day if you want me.  Do you?”

“Yes....  But God knows what I may do to you....  There’ll be somebody to—­watch me—­won’t there?...  I don’t know what may happen to you or to myself....  I’m in a bad way, Miss Erith...  I’m in a very bad way.”

“I know,” she murmured.

He said with an almost childish directness:  “Do men always live through such cures?...  I don’t see how I can live through it.”

She rose from the sofa and stood beside him, feeling still dizzy, still tremulous and lacking strength.

“Let us win through,” she said, not looking at him.  “I think you will suffer more than I shall.  A little more....  Because I had rather feel pain than give it—­rather suffer than look on suffering....  It will be very hard for us both, I fear.”

Her butler announced luncheon.

CHAPTER IV

WRECKAGE

The man had been desperately ill in soul and mind and body.  And now in some curious manner the ocean seemed to be making him physically better but spiritually worse.  Something, too, in the horizonwide waste of waters was having a sinister effect on his brain.  The grey daylight of early May, bitter as December—­the utter desolation, the mounting and raucous menace of the sea, were meddling with normal convalescence.