With the first streak of day Paul was on deck. The blow-off of the donkey, which he had set at a low pressure a couple of hours before, roused him from the berth he had stretched along the carpenter's bench. Custom trains seafarers as it does soldiers on campaign to live by a broken sleep which the average workaday citizen thinks would kill him. Although Paul had been up at intervals during the night, with an eye for the weather and any chance lights, he was filled with an eager freshness. A stirring was coming out of the northwest. There was a tang in it which promised a whole sail breeze. It put a song in his heart, and a little while later Emily was awakened by his clear voice ringing through the morning air, "The Chanty of the Rio Grande."  
"'Where are you going to, my pretty maid?
O away Rio!
  Where are you going to, my pretty maid?
We are bound to the Rio Grande.
O away Rio,
O away Rio,
  O fare you well, my bonny young girl,
  We are bound to the Rio Grande.'"
When Emily got forward to the galley she found breakfast waiting.
 
"Why didn't you call me, Paul?" she asked in a tone of protest, and she waited archly in expectancy of a kiss, but he did not seem to notice this. "Partners must play fair."
 
"Never mind, Emily. I can do so little for you. From now on it will be watch and watch and there will not be much that I can do for you."
 
The bending of a new fore upper topsail and straightening out the tangle of running gear about decks occupied most of the forenoon. It was not until after luncheon that the Daphne, with Emily at the wheel, lifted away to the eastward before a fresh northwesterly breeze.
 
Paul ran aft as the bark entered upon her task and stood for a moment beside Emily. The intoxication which she had first experienced alone at the wheel was again upon her. The breeze was dusting loose wisps of her hair into a halo which the sun burnished with fire. Bosom heaving, eyes alight, her whole virgin being alive, a-thrill with love and the sensation of the Daphne's motion, she presented a figure which would have given fame to any brush that could have limned it. She might have been Daphne herself, not fleeing from, but hastening with her fresh treasures to meet Apollo.
 
Paul felt that he dare not speak. He put his hand on the wheel to haul the bark half a point closer to the wind. As he drew it away Emily touched it impulsively.
 
"Good strong, honest man's hand," she murmured.
 
Their eyes met in a flash in which her soul called to his and trembled when echo only seemed to answer it.
 
Paul turned abruptly away to stray the patent log over the taffrail. Then he went forward in silence. When he found himself a few minutes later staring out over the weather bow he wondered how he had gotten there. And the gold woman, watching him until he disappeared, kissed the wheel spoke his hand had touched and even again in the sweet agony of her love when she saw that it was flecked with the blood of his storm travail.
 
That evening Paul established the rule by which he thought it best to work the ship. Emily would stand a watch and trick at the wheel of two hours and have three hours below. His watch would be three on deck and two below.
 
"It isn't fair, Paul," the gold woman protested when he explained it to her.
 
"It is fair, Emily. I wish I might spare you every bit of the coarse hard things you have to do."
 
"That's just it. You are always thinking of sparing me."
 
"Take your orders or go to your room," he said with a pretended seriousness. Emily started with a gasp. Her thoughts leaped to McGovern's story of what had happened on the bridge of the Yakutat. This was what Graham had said to Paul that fateful night.
 
"I—I will take my orders," she answered in a low voice.
 
"Why, dear, what is the matter? I didn't mean to frighten you. I'm a ruffian. Do forgive me."
 
"No, you should forgive me. I had no right to question what you said. You know best."
 
She drew in beside him on the lee side of the wheel.
 
"I've been away from civilization so long that I imagine that I've forgotten how to speak decently to white folk."
 
"Then I should like to send ever so many men that I know at home where you have been."
 
"Bravo! But 'ever so many men'?"
 
"Well, they wear trousers."
 
"You are cynical."
 
"No, observant."
 
"I'm afraid you are a new woman."
 
"I am. I have just been reborn. Oh, Paul, I have never lived until now. I have never known what life meant. I have lived as one blind, incompetent, thoughtless. Like most of those I knew before you came into my life I had just a vague notion that the earth was round. You know the kind."
 
"Yes. Take the fiction of civilization away from them and every nine hundred and ninety-nine would perish overnight."
 
"I saw them in extremity aboard the Cambodia. How many knew one end of a boat from the other? They were all thinking of living, crying to live, and hardly one out of ten knew what to do to save their most precious possession—life."
 
"There is a big thought behind what you say."
 
"You started it in me."
 
Paul looked over his shoulder at the sea. After a considerable silence he said:
 
"I wonder how many came through?"
 
The question was addressed to the sea as much as it was to Emily. She shuddered.
 
"Here!" he exclaimed brusquely. "What are we doing? There is Polaris up there smiling at you, my lady."
 
His face was lit with a wonderful smile as he spoke. It drove the gloom from her mind which their reference to the Cambodia had produced. Soon they were off on an expedition to the stars, each in turn naming one and identifying its bearings. Paul had introduced Emily to this "game" the second night on the island, and then as now they lost themselves in it in a childish delight. His mental equipment was forever startling the gold woman. Where he had found the time to garner the store of knowledge that was his and to keep abreast of the times, leading such a life as he had for ten years, was a marvel to her.
 
"Ha! Ha!" Paul laughed suddenly as the cabin clock, which he had moved into the lounge, struck two bells. The laugh broke the spell of the stars which held Emily, only to weave her immediately in another.
 
"'I have shot back to Paris!'"
Paul laughed and made a pretense of dusting himself.
 
"'Come—pardon me—by the last waterspout,
  Covered with ether,—accident of travel!
  My eyes still full of star-dust, and my spurs
  Encumbered by the planets' filaments!
  Ha! on my doublet! A comet's hair!'"
As he finished this snatch from Cyrano de Bergerac's sky-traveling tale, Paul pretended to pick a comet's hair from his sleeve.
 
"Oh, my beloved 'Cyrano'!" exclaimed Emily, identifying the lines. "Do go on," and in answer Paul went through the entire scene between Cyrano and De Guiche.
 
"And I will applaud—I will pay you thus," and the gold woman reached up and kissed the helmsman on brow and lip.
 
Thus they both came back from across the world and the four centuries whither the magic of the romantic lines had transported them.
 
"Come, Emily, didn't you hear two bells strike? You have let me waste nearly an hour of your watch below. Turn in."
 
"It has been an hour of magic."
 
She held her mouth up to be kissed. His lips barely touched hers and flashed away, and as she went through the lounge door, he murmured, still in the words of his Gascon hero, "'I soon shall reach the moon.'"
 
Fifteen days later the gold woman was at the wheel again, having relieved Paul to permit him to make his noon observa............