I was propped up in an easy chair. Up to two days back I had been on a
cot. Mr. Cunningham had improved so rapidly that for more than a week
now he had been allowed on deck, and there he was now, as I said,
listening with his daughter to the tales of Captain Blaise. His laughter
and her breaths of suspense, I could hear the one and feel the other.

I took up my pad of paper and resumed my writing. And reviewing my
writing, I had to smile at myself, even as I used to smile at Captain
Blaise when he would submit his couplets or quatrains for my judgment.
He might marshal off-hand a stanza or two of his vagabond thoughts, but
here was I carefully composing with pencil and paper, and had been for a
week now.

I had never been ill before, never for five minutes. And this illness
had driven me to a strange introspection. There had been time to think.
I smiled at Captain Blaise's amateurish rhymings on the veranda of the
manor-house. I had condemned him in my own mind for this death or that
death of his irregular career; on that last night on the veranda I had
even allowed him to read my thoughts of such matters. And now I could
not recollect of his having ever killed or maimed except in defence of
his life or property; and yet that night in Momba I had shot, caring not
whether I killed or no. Self-defence? At the instant of shooting I had
thought, had almost spoken it aloud: "There! There's for a channel to
let the starlight into your unclean brain." Self-defence? Tish! The
Governor's son desired, possibly loved in his way, a girl that I had
known no longer than I knew him, and there it was--I loved her, too!
Captain Blaise himself had probably never killed on less provocation;
and meditating on his emotional side, on his many provocations, his
life-long environment, I had to concede that the Captain Blaise I