alone, just like the others. Each man was alone. Was I to give up my
revolver? Who to? Or was I to throw it into the sea? What would
have been the good? Only the best man would survive. It was a great,
terrible, and cruel misfortune."

He had survived! I saw him before me as though preserved for a witness
to the mighty truth of an unerring and eternal principle. Great beads
of perspiration stood on his forehead. And suddenly it struck the table
with a heavy blow, as he fell forward throwing his hands out.

"And this is worse," he cried. "This is a worse pain! This is more
terrible."

He made my heart thump with the profound conviction of his cries. And
after he had left me alone I called up before my mental eye the image
of the girl weeping silently, abundantly, patiently, and as if
irresistibly. I thought of her tawny hair. I thought how, if unplaited,
it would have covered her all round as low as the hips, like the hair of
a siren. And she had bewitched him. Fancy a man who would guard his
own life with the inflexibility of a pitiless and immovable fate, being
brought to lament that once a crowbar had missed his skull! The sirens
sing and lure to death, but this one had been weeping silently as if
for the pity of his life. She was the tender and voiceless siren of this
appalling navigator. He evidently wanted to live his whole conception
of life. Nothing else would do. And she too was a servant of that
life that, in the midst of death, cries aloud to our senses. She was
eminently fitted to interpret for him its feminine side. And in her own
way, and with her own profusion of sensuous charms, she also seemed
to illustrate the eternal truth of an unerring principle. I don't know
though what sort of principle Hermann illustrated when he turned up