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“Well,” said the captain, “you don’t seem cheered up much by word from your friends. I was too busy looking at them to rightly catch everything they said, but I know they told me they were going to London in the Glanford. This I remembered, because it struck me what a jolly piece of good luck it all was for Captain Guy.”

“And for what port are you bound?” I asked. “La Guayra,” he said. “It isn’t a very good time of the year to be there; but I don’t doubt that you can find some vessel or other there that will take you north, so you’re all right.”

I was not all right. Bertha was saved. I was saved; but I had received no message. I knew nothing; and I was going away from her.

Two or three days after this, the captain came to me and said: “Look here, young man; you seem to be in the worst kind of doleful dumps. People who have been picked up in the middle of the ocean don’t generally look like that. I wonder if you’re not a little love-sick on account of a young woman on the Glanford.”

I made no answer; I would not rebuke him, for he had saved my life; but this was a subject which I did not wish to discuss with a sea-captain.

“If that’s really what’s the matter with you,” said he, “I can give you a piece of advice which will do you good if you take it. I think you told me that you are not engaged to this lady,” (I nodded) “and that you never proposed to her except through a speaking-trumpet.” I allowed silence to make assent. “Well, now, my advice is to give her up, to drop all thoughts of her, and to make up your mind to tackle onto some other girl when you find one that is good enough. You haven’t the least chance in the world with this one. Captain Guy is mad in love with her. He told me so himself, and when he’s out and out in love with a girl he’s bound to get her. When I was with him he might have been married once a month if he’d chosen to; but he didn’t choose. Now he does choose, and I can tell you that he’s not going to make love through a speaking-trumpet. He’ll go straight at it, and he’ll win, too. There’s every reason why he should win. In the first place, he’s one of the handsomest fellows, and I don’t doubt one of the best love-makers that you would be likely to meet on land or sea. And then again, she has every reason to be grateful to him and to look on him as a hero.”

I listened without a word. The captain’s reasoning seemed to me very fallacious.

“You don’t know it,” said he, “but Captain Guy did a good deal more than pick up those two women from an abandoned vessel. You see he was making his way north with a pretty fair wind from the south-west, the first they’d had for several days, and when his lookout sighted La Fidelite nobody on board thought for a minute that he would try to beat up to her, for she lay a long way to the west of his course, though pretty well in sight.

“But Captain Guy has sharp eyes and a good glass, and he vowed that he could see something on the wreck that looked like a handkerchief waved by a woman. He told me this himself as we were walking from my ship to his. Everybody laughed at him and wanted to know if women waved handkerchiefs different from other people.

“They said that any bit of canvas might wave like that, and that it was plain enough that the vessel was abandoned. If it was not, it could be, for there was a boat still hanging to one of its davits. Captain Guy paid no attention to this, but spied a little longer; then he vowed that he was going to make for that vessel. There was one of the owners on board, and he up and forbid Captain Guy to do it. He told him that they had been delayed enough on the voyage by light winds, and now that they would be over-due at their port a good many days before they got there. Every day lost, he said, was money lost to the owners. He had never heard of any skipper undertaking a piece of tomfoolery like this. It would take all day to beat up to that wreck, and when they reached it they would find an old derelict, which was no more than they could see now. And as for there being a woman on board, that was all stuff. The skipper had woman on the brain.