It was indeed she, that beloved one, whose name he had so dotingly murmured to himself a thousand times, in the lonely watches of the night, when treading the ship's deck under the sparkling stars of the tropics, when the glorious planets of the Southern Cross--fabled by the devout mariners of the old Spanish Argosies to be "a brooch taken from the breast of the blessed _Madre de Dios_"--looked close and nigh, so close as to cast the ship's shadow on the rolling waters.
It was she whom he had imagined in those wild dreams by day, when the dreams of the waking are wilder by far than those of the sleeper.
She was beside him again, and they were hand in hand as of old, eye bent on eye, lip meeting lip. Ethel, his own Ethel--after all they had undergone--was beside him, so suddenly, so unexpectedly, that it seemed indeed a dream, or like a set scene, the plot or conception of a sensational romance or playwright--a trafficker in plots, contrivances, and _situations_.
It was so, and truth proved stronger than fiction after all!
And so, forgetful of others, forgetful assuredly of breakfast, till Joe in the steerage and Quaco in the galley were in despair about the eggs and coffee, they would have sat till the sun that now shone through amber clouds so merrily ahead to the eastward had beamed his farewell rays in crimson through the stern-windows from the westward, had not Joe's bell, rung vigorously and impatiently for the third time, brought the whole party, including Mr. Foster, who had no sympathy whatever for lovers, and who felt famished, having had charge of the deck since 4 to 8 A.M.--the morning watch--and it was now half-past 10, alike by his appetite and the captain's chronometer.
All oblivious of the unhappy wretch who was "chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy" aloft in the fore-crosstrees (where the swaying of the mast made the rolling of the ship seem so much greater than below) jovial indeed was the party which assembled at the sound of Joe's bell, and how curly-headed Joe's honest English face shone as he handed round coffee and tea, with whipped eggs for cream, or as he skipped about with hot water, and handed to the ladies preserves in tin cans, midshipmen's nuts and American biscuits in a silver bread-barge, a spotless white towel thrown over the sleeve of his round jacket the while, for Joe was something of a hybrid, half waiter and half seaman.