Pain which stabbed with daggers of fire and ground and twisted like the working of cogs stirred Paul about noon into consciousness. He lay across the wheel grating where he had dropped, nor had the gold woman's strength been equal to moving him inside. A pillow was under his head; a blanket covered him. At his feet wrapped likewise in a blanket and her head on one of the lounge cushions slept his "partner." As the hard deck was his pallet, so she had chosen to make it hers. He realized the wonderful meaning of this with a thrill which lifted the daze from his aching brain and eyes.  
With the instinct which has been given to women alone to serve and watch by sense Emily awoke in the instant that Paul moved to a sitting posture. Their glances met in a smile of trustful, mutual understanding.
 
"Well, partner," Paul said drily and looking round the Daphne, "we are a bit battered, but I think we may say—we are still in the ring."
 
The humanness of the little speech lifted the cloud of the night from her spirit. She laughed. This man could fight as she had never dreamed it possible that human brain and flesh could, and when it was all over he could smile. She brushed away a mist which gathered on her lashes and struggled to her feet.
 
"And it is worth everything to be—be here in the ring—all the battering—all the strife—with you—a partner like you."
 
"Thank you. That pays for everything."
 
As Paul spoke he struggled halfway to his feet only to sink back again with his breath catching in pain. His left hand, with which he had tried to pull himself up, fell from the wheel. He compared it with his right. Both were swollen and purple. The cuffs of the oilskin coat dropped back and showed his shirt wristbands choking the flesh. But it was not his hands that hurt so much as it was his feet. They seemed ready to burst the shoes.
 
A sob broke from Emily at his helplessness. She dropped on her knees at his side and picked up his right hand. All the tenderness of her woman nature was alive in the instant.
 
"What is it, Paul? Your feet—your hands!"
 
Tears choked further utterance. Alarm for his safety seized her. A terrible apprehension touched her heart.
 
"There never was a battle fought without somebody getting hurt." He tried to smile despite his pain. "Remember I was at the wheel a pretty long time."
 
"More than thirty hours."
 
"That long?" He nodded. "Please get me a knife—there ought to be one in the pantry."
 
"A knife?" she repeated with misgiving. He nodded.
 
Emily hastened below and returned with a small sharp carver. Paul held out both hands to her.
 
"Cut——"
 
She shrank from him with a cry. His smile at the thought which he read in her eyes made her study him with a strange, frightened glance.
 
"Not my hands—the wristbands, partner."
 
She severed the wristbands and the tears which fell on the bruised hands seemed for the moment to salve their hurt. He offered to take the knife then, but she knelt quickly at his feet and slashed the wet, binding leather from them. The while she did it he kept abjuring her to be careful not to cut off a foot by mistake. He would have been silent could he have known how sacred to this woman was the doing of this personal service for him. But it was just as well that he was not silent, for as she saw what the sea had done to him it took the last element of her will to keep from breaking down.
 
"Now you must go and lie down," she urged when she had helped him to get up to a standing position.
 
"No, I must keep going. I——"
 
He swayed and sank to his knees. His will nor her strength could keep him up. He gritted his teeth in rebellion.
 
"I must get up! I will—and go on!"
 
This came from him in a savage cry. He tried to rise again. He got one foot under him and then fell inertly with his back against the side of the lounge house. Abused Nature would have her due.
 
The sight of this strong man down, helpless, tore the heart of the gold woman from its moorings. She knelt beside him, agony blinding her with tears.
 
"Paul, you must listen to me," she pleaded passionately. "You must let me help you inside—where you can rest—where I can do something for you—something to bring back your strength—bathe your hands and feet."
 
"No, no; not that," he protested faintly.
 
A gentle relaxation of mind and body was stealing over him under the pressure of the arm with which she supported his head.
 
"But you must," Emily went on. "It is my part—my duty, my privilege! I will do it! You must do as I say until you are well and strong. It will not be long."
 
The rebellion of his spirit grew quiet under the influence of her surpassing tenderness. He thought it pleasant to have somebody say must to him.
 
"Look, Paul, the ocean grows calmer with the minutes. The skies are clearing. There is nothing we could do——"
 
"But there's so much to do——" His senses began slipping away. He was able to murmur only, "Water," before a long blank came.
 
The gold woman looked round for the water canister which she had filled and brought aft when Paul had collapsed and fallen asleep. It lay overturned down to leeward. Laying his head on a pillow she ran forward and refilled the canister. At the first sup which she was able to force into his month he opened his eyes.
 
"More, more," he pleaded when she would have taken the canister from his lips, thinking he could drink no more. "Oh, that is so good," he sighed, finishing the draught. "I feel much better already."
 
Although Paul smiled bravely, his eyes betrayed him. Emily saw that he was fighting to conceal a great pain.
 
"Come, Paul." She lifted his head again. "You must try to get inside. You must do this for me."
 
He looked up into her face, and there was that in it which filled him with meekness.
 
"I'll do what you say," he answered in a whisper, and he summoned his last reserve of strength.
 
On hands and knees he crawled into the lounge, Emily taking as much weight from his swollen wrists as she could. She cut the oilskin coat from his shoulders so that he should not suffer the pain of having the sleeves drawn over his hands. She spread a berth deftly, hurried below, and returned with dry comfortable clothing which she found in the lockers under the skipper's bed. The slop-chest supplies were soaking in the water which had come in before she had succeeded in shutting the alleyway door. She went below again and brought lint and bandages from the medicine chest. All of these things she did without suggestion. It was part of the new efficiency unto which she had won. Had she been trained to do what she did she could not have done it more thoroughly. This man whom she served might have been her own child.
 
Watching her quick movements from where he sat on the floor of the lounge, Paul wondered whence she was drawing the strength that was denied him. Nor was it given to either of them to understand this strength which love can bring to its service. It is something not to be understood.
 
"Why are you able to do this and why am I——"
 
"Because you have rendered your service," she interrupted. "You made me rest. You stood alone through all the fight. At times I rebelled at it, but now I am glad. I slept this morning and——" She paused with a shudder. "I know I must have slept—or gone out of my senses—during the storm. There are blanks—so many——We are all alone again, you know. The derelict——"
 
"I know. Please don't think of it now. Please——"
 
"No—we will not think of it," she said with an effort. "Come."
 
She bent over him to help him to the waiting berth. A plait of her hair swept his lips. He kissed it as she drew it back and tossed it over her shoulder. Her bosom touched his head. She did not know that she was but adding torture to his pain.
 
"No, partner," he protested quickly. "I have let you do too much already. Let me try alone."
 
By elbow and knee he crawled up on the berth and sat down.
 
"There," he said with a small note of triumph, and he was fearful of meeting her gaze, for he sensed that she stood waiting. "I think—if——See how she's heading, please."
 
He looked out through the door at the wheel jerking in its beckets like a horse champing a bit.
 
Emily went swiftly to the binnacle.
 
"West nor'west," she called.
 
"Then this breeze ought to be about nor'nor'west." He paused, and then added quickly as he saw her, in all her innocence, coming back:
 
"If I could get something warm to drink—some coffee—or tea. Do you think——"
 
"But you——"
 
"I'm sure I can do a lot for myself now. See."
 
He lifted his arms over his head. By a levy on all his will he concealed the pain which tore him at the effort. It satisfied her.
 
"You shall have something warm to drink as soon as these hands can make it," she said, and as he heard her going forward he threw himself on the berth and buried his face in the pillow to smother the cry of anguish which his lips refused to stay.
 
Swiftly as Emily moved to her task, it took her longer than she had imagined it would to prepare something. The galley was in a litter of wreckage and the range was water-soaked where the sea had poured through the unprotected vent left by the swept-away stovepipe. When she returned aft again it was to awaken Paul from a doze. In the meantime he had succeeded in changing into the dry clothing she had laid out for him. He had also bandaged his ankles and wrists.
 
The gold woman brought tea and hardtack biscuits and a jar of marmalade.
 
"It was the best I could do quickly," she explained, raising the chart table and placing the things on it. The table had fallen some time during the night and the silver watch lay dashed in pieces on the door, its parts mingling with the internals of the barometer which had been torn from its fastenings. The sextant, undamaged, lay where it had been hurled on the starboard bench or berth opposite Paul.
 
"It's all right, partner," Paul said as Emily discovered the broken things. "Don't worry."
 
When it came to drinking his tea his hands could not hold the mug in which she was compelled to serve it. She gave it to him mouthful by mouthful. The hot drink was stimulating. There was satisfaction of hunger, too, in the biscuits and marmalade. She stopped feeding him and drank and ate something only when he closed his lips firmly and turned his face from her.
 
And all the while there was raging within him a battle against the impulse of his consuming love to take this wonderful innocent woman to his breast. Had he not won the right to tell her that he loved her? a voice within kept repeating, and always the specter of the past, armed with the resolution of silence he had formed two days before, cried: "No; unless you are a coward."
 
"I think I will sleep," Paul said presently, when Emily offered to rub and rebandage his ankles.
 
"Is it because you do not wish me to do it?"
 
"Why, no. Of course not."
 
"You thought nothing of doing it for me. You have done everything for me and with a tenderness that I can remember only as part of my mother. You are so tender and again you are so harsh—as hard and cold as steel."
 
"The sea makes one harsh——" He could not control his voice and he stopped short in fear of whither he might be led. He noticed then for the first time that Emily's skirt was clinging to her damply. "Do please go below and get into some fresh, dry clothing. The thought that you are looking out for yourself will help me to sleep. Do try to lie down, too."
 
"If there is nothing more I can do here I will go," she said obediently. "But it is a strange thing: With all the wetting I have undergone I have not the sign of a cold."
 
"Salt water ought to have at least one virtue," he answered. As he spoke he nodded for her to go below.
 
Paul Lavelle slept only for a few minutes at a time, if he really slept at all during the next couple of hours. He heard the gold woman descend the companionway and he followed her footsteps through the cabin. Even when all was quiet below and he knew that Emily must be lying down wakefulness rode his brain. He could see the future stretching away in loneliness without this woman in his life, and for the first time in all the suffering he had known he thought of a way out. In his blackest hours of the past ten years this had never occurred to him. To fight on to the end without cease, with never a let-up in the drive, had been the ruling impulse of his spirit. To fight on now in silence and give life to this precious woman; to stand up manfully no matter what the odds, with his whole soul in the battle, until he should bring her to safety—this was the one course. After that there would be a way if it were denied him that he should not suffer death in the giving of life to her. A gnawing pain in his left hand finally drew his attention to it. He saw that the green jade ring which he had worn constantly since leaving Yokohama was choking the finger which it encircled. He sat up to take it off, and as he did so he was startled to hear a strange heavy footfall in the cabin. He was on the point of trying to rise when Emily came up through the companionway. It was her footfall that had alarmed him. As her head and shoulders rose above the teakwood rail around the staircase, the sun, now far down in the west, shot a golden beam through the port over Paul's berth. It touched her head with the fire of a divine beauty.
 
"Oh, I woke you," she whispered tremulously, and at the same time she sensed his depression of spirit.
 
"No, I was awake," was all he could say for the moment. It came from his lips in a barely audible voice.
 
To be loved by and by love to possess a woman like this—the world, aye a thousand worlds—were well lost! That was the thought which excluded everything else from his mind.
 
The glow of a sleep which had refreshed and restored lingered in the cheeks of the gold woman and in the tips of her shelly ears. Her mouth was retouched with its natural delicate scarlet. Her sensitive nostrils quivered at the sunlight's touch. Her blue-shirted bosom, heaving ever so slightly from the exertion of climbing the companionway, moved the loose plaits of her hair hanging over her shoulders like ropes of molten gold. Hardship had drawn her features only slightly. Youth's capacity of quick recovery was hers. Physically she was little changed, but there was a subtle difference in her. Her whole being now seemed to breathe: "I have no doubt of life."
 
"I've changed and slept," she said as Paul's glance swept her. "I feel as if there had never been a storm."
 
She stepped backward with a smile.
 
"Are you laughing at them?" she asked. She drew back her skirt slightly and exhibited a pair of rubber sea boots which were inches too large for her. There was something boyish in the action that did draw a smile from Lavelle. "You are laughing," she went on, and pouted prettily. "But do so as much as you wish. They're sensible."
 
"Right you are. They're the very thing for decks like this. We should have thought of them before."
 
"They're much too large, but I've put on socks and socks and stuffed the toes with things."
 
This statement of a most obvious fact brought a genuine laugh from Paul. It passed quickly as the pain caused by the ring reasserted itself.
 
"Oh, let me do that for you," Emily said, crossing to his side. Before he could object she had knelt by him and taken his hand. "Why did I not think of this hours ago? Poor, poor fingers. Am I hurting you? There?"
 
The perfume of her hair, of her breath, of her whole being was about him. As the ring came off his hand closed on hers and he slipped the jade, with its strange seal in Chinese hieroglyphics, over her third finger. It was her left hand that he had chosen.
 
"I want you to take this, Emily—to wear it." He was fighting hard to control his voice. "Chang gave it to me the day I left Yokohama—when the old chap thought he would never see me again: the day you and I met."
 
"But, Paul, I——Poor old Chang would——"
 
"You must keep it. Have I never told you what it says—that seal?" She shook her head. "In Canton there is a very old temple. It is doubtful who built it. It stands near—not far from the Hall of the Five Hundred Wise Men. This seal is copied from its altars: 'Man has many reckonings with man, but only one with God.'"
 
The gold woman looked up, starting to repeat the line as Paul finished it. What was on her lips died there, unutterable in the light of his gaze, and what it awakened in her. Her eyes flashed back to his an answer of fire. The barriers of his determination crashed.
 
"Oh, my darling!" he cried in anguish, and he drew her head to his breast.
 
The gold woman's mouth met his and clung, rendering with flame its first kiss of love.
 
"Oh, I love you, woman of all the world, love you, love you! I am living alone by the power of this love. It has been mine for ages. It has been—it is my strength! It is my soul! It is the breath of my soul! Its single impulse, its desire, its law, its life!"
 
He held her from him and searched her face.
 
"And I love you. I have always loved you, my——"
 
A burning kiss blurred the words on her lips.
 
In silence they held each other's gaze in adoration until suddenly a shadow of dread darkened the man's face.
 
"Another storm such as we have just passed through——We could not live through it, darling. There was hardly a minute of last night or the day before which did not come armed with a summons to judgment. And, oh, the bitterness that was mine when I thought that you could not know; that I could not tell you what was in the soul of me!"
 
"But, Paul, even had death come to us then, I should have known it—afterward. I should have known it and you would have known that I loved you."
 
The firm conviction of this speech filled Paul with a new kind of awe of her.
 
"Darling," he murmured, and yet, as he kissed her eyes, the specter of the past laid its cold finger upon his lips. He drew back. "Some day you may hate me."
 
"Paul, Paul! Stop!"
 
Her voice was fraught with fear.
 
"If we live the days will come when—I come to you a broken, spurned thing. I have no place among the men of my people. I am wild! Crazy! My tongue should be torn from me for telling you what I have. I have no right to tell—I have no right to love! And you of all women——Emily, there is something—that night on the Yakutat, I must tell you—we cannot——"
 
Her hand closed his lips.
 
"No, no, no, Paul. You mustn't. I know. There is nothing to tell me. There is no past to come between us. From the moment that I knew on the Cambodia that you were Paul Lavelle I knew the truth. There is no past. But there is a future, my darling—our future." She drew his head to her and kissed his eyes. "My fearless stars. For my faith's reward I ask only this: Your silence until I say you may speak. Promise."
 
"I promise," he answered, with a strange, indefinable hope burgeo............