the fault?"

"Captain Lingard!" cried Willems, under the sudden impulse of a
felicitous inspiration, "if you leave me here on this jetty--it's
murder. I shall never return to that place alive, wife or no wife. You
may just as well cut my throat at once."

The old seaman started.

"Don't try to frighten me, Willems," he said, with great severity, and
paused.

Above the accents of Willems' brazen despair he heard, with considerable
uneasiness, the whisper of his own absurd conscience. He meditated for
awhile with an irresolute air.

"I could tell you to go and drown yourself, and be damned to you," he
said, with an unsuccessful assumption of brutality in his manner, "but
I won't. We are responsible for one another--worse luck. I am almost
ashamed of myself, but I can understand your dirty pride. I can!
By . . ."

He broke off with a loud sigh and walked briskly to the steps, at the
bottom of which lay his boat, rising and falling gently on the slight
and invisible swell.

"Below there! Got a lamp in the boat? Well, light it and bring it up,
one of you. Hurry now!"

He tore out a page of his pocketbook, moistened his pencil with great