The foreboded storm did not come so soon as had been feared, but the beautiful weather which had lasted so long was lost in a thickened sky and a sullen¹ sea. The weather had changed with Staniford, too. The morning after the events last celebrated², he did not respond to the glance which Lydia gave him when they met, and he hardened his heart to her surprise, and shunned³ being alone with her. He would not admit to himself any reason for his attitude, and he could not have explained to her the mystery that at first visibly grieved her, and then seemed merely to benumb her. But the moment came when he ceased to take a certain cruel pleasure in it, and he approached her one morning on deck, where she stood holding fast to the railing where she usually sat, and said, as if there had been no interval⁴ of estrangement⁵ between them, but still coldly, “We have had our last walk for the present, Miss Blood. I hope you will grieve a little for my loss.”  
She turned on him a look that cut him to the heart, with what he fancied its reproach and its wonder. She did not reply at once, and then she did not reply to his hinted question.
 
“Mr. Staniford,” she began. It was the second time he had heard her pronounce his name; he distinctly remembered the first.
 
“Well?” he said.
 
“I want to speak to you about lending that book to Mr. Hicks. I ought to have asked you first.”
 
“Oh, no,” said Staniford. “It was yours.”
 
“You gave it to me,” she returned.
 
“Well, then, it was yours,—to keep, to lend, to throw away.”
 
“And you didn't mind my lending it to him?” she pursued. “I—”
 
She stopped, and Staniford hesitated, too. Then he said, “I didn't dislike your lending it; I disliked his having it. I will acknowledge that.”
 
She looked up at him as if she were going to speak, but checked herself, and glanced away. The ship was plunging⁶ heavily, and the livid waves were racing⁷ before the wind. The horizon was lit with a yellow brightness in the quarter to which she turned, and a pallid⁸ gleam defined her profile. Captain Jenness was walking fretfully to and fro; he glanced now at the yellow glare, and now cast his eye aloft at the shortened sail. While Staniford stood questioning whether she meant to say anything more, or whether, having discharged her conscience of an imagined offense⁹, she had now reached one of her final, precipitous silences, Captain Jenness suddenly approached them, and said to him, “I guess you'd better go below with Miss Blood.”
 
The storm that followed had its hazards, but Staniford's consciousness was confined to its discomforts¹⁰. The day came, and then the dark came, and both in due course went, and came again. Where he lay in his berth¹¹, and whirled and swung, and rose and sank, as lonely as a planetary fragment tossing in space, he heard the noises of the life without. Amidst the straining of the ship, which was like the sharp sweep of a thunder-shower on the deck overhead, there plunged¹² at irregular intervals¹³ the wild trample¹⁴ of heavily-booted feet, and now and then the voices of the crew answering the shouted orders made themselves hollowly audible. In the cabin there was talking, and sometimes even laughing. Sometimes he heard the click of knives and forks, the sardonic¹⁵ rattle¹⁶ of crockery. After the first insane feeling that somehow he must get ashore¹⁷ and escape from his torment¹⁸, he hardened himself to it through an immense contempt, equally insane, for the stupidity of the sea, its insensate uproar¹⁹, its blind and ridiculous and cruel mischievousness²⁰. Except for this delirious²¹ scorn he was a surface of perfect passivity.
 
Dunham, after a day of prostration²², had risen, and had perhaps shortened his anguish²³ by his resolution. He had since taken up his quarters on a locker²⁴ in the cabin; he looked in now and then upon Staniford, with a cup of tea, or a suggestion of something light to eat; once he even dared to boast of the sublimity²⁵ of the ocean. Staniford stared at him with eyes of lack-lustre indifference²⁶, and waited for him to be gone. But he lingered to say, “You would laugh to see what a sea-bird our lady is! She hasn't been sick a minute. And Hicks, you'll be glad to know, is behaving himself very well. Really, I don't think we've done the fellow justice. I think you've overshadowed him, and that he's needed your absence to show himself to advantage.”
 
Staniford disdained²⁷ any comment on this except a fierce “Humph!” and dismissed Dunham by turning his face to the wall. He refused to think of what he had said. He lay still and suffered indefinitely, and no longer waited for the end of the storm. There had been times when he thought with acquiescence²⁸ of going to the bottom, as a probable conclusion; now he did not expect anything. At last, one night, he felt by inexpressibly minute degrees something that seemed surcease of his misery²⁹. It might have been the end of all things, for all he cared; but as the lull³⁰ deepened, he slept without knowing what it was, and when he woke in the morning he found the Aroostook at anchor in smooth water.
 
She was lying in the roads at Gibraltar, and before her towered the embattled rock. He crawled on deck after a while. The captain was going ashore, and had asked such of his passengers as liked, to go with him and see the place. When Staniford appeared, Dunham was loyally refusing to leave his friend till he was fairly on foot. At sight of him they suspended their question long enough to welcome him back to animation³¹, with the patronage³² with which well people hail a convalescent. Lydia looked across the estrangement of the past days with a sort of inquiry³³, and Hicks chose to come forward and accept a cold touch of the hand from him. Staniford saw, with languid observance, that Lydia was very fresh and bright; she was already equipped for the expedition, and could never have had any doubt in her mind as to going. She had on a pretty walking dress which he had not seen before, and a hat with the rim³⁴ struck sharply upward behind, and her masses of dense

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