Dull animosity awoke in a battered mind not yet readjusted to the living world.  What had these people done to him anyway?  The sullen resentment which invaded him groped stealthily for a vent.

Was this, then, their cursed cure?—­this foggy nightmare through which he moved like a shade in the realm of phantoms?  Little by little what had happened to him was becoming an obsession, as he began to remember in detail.  Now he brooded on it and looked askance at the girl who was primarily responsible—­conscious in a confused sort of way that he was a blackguard for his ingratitude.

But his mind had been badly knocked about, and its limping machinery creaked.

“That meddling woman,” he thought, knowing all the time what he owed her, remembering her courage, her unselfishness, her loveliness.  “Curse her!” he muttered, amid the shadows confusing his wounded mind.

Then a meaningless anger grew with him:  She had him, now! he was trapped and caged.  A girl who drags something floundering out of hell is entitled to the thing if she wants it.  He admitted that to himself.

But how about that “cure”?

Was this it—­this terrible blankness—­this misty unreality of things?  Surcease from craving—­yes.  But what to take its place—­what to fill in, occupy mind and body?  What sop to his restless soul?  What had this young iconoclast offered him after her infernal era of destruction?  A distorted world, a cloudy mind, the body-substance of a ghost?  And for the magic world she had destroyed she offered him a void to live in—­Curse her!

There were no lights showing aboard the transport; all ports remained screened.  Arrows, painted on the decks in luminous paint, pointed out the way.  Below decks, a blue globe here and there emitted a feeble glimmer, marking corridors which pierced a depthless darkness.

No noise was permitted on board, no smoking, no other lights in cabin or saloon.  There was scarcely a sound to be heard on the ship, save the throbbing of her engines, the long, splintering crash of heavy seas, and the dull creak of her steel vertebrae tortured by a million rivets.

As for the accursed ocean, that to McKay was the enemy paramount which had awakened him to the stinging vagueness of things out of his stupid acquiescence in convalescence.

He hated the sea.  It was becoming a crawling horror to him in its every protean phase, whether flecked with ghastly lights in storms or haunted by pallid shapes in colour—­always, always it remained repugnant to him under its eternal curse of endless motion.

He loathed it:  he detested the livid skies by day against which tossing waves showed black:  he hated every wave at night and their ceaseless unseen motion.  McKay had been “cured.”  McKay was very, very ill.

There came to him, at intervals, a girl who stole through the obscurity of the pitching corridors guiding him from one faint blue light to the next—­a girl who groped out the way with him at night to the deck by following the painted arrows under foot.  Also sometimes she sat at his bedside through the unreal flight of time, her hand clasped over his.  He knew that he had been brutal to her during his “cure.”