"And--oh, my mother! I most forgot her. She lives in Port Rock.
To-morrow night I'll put you aboard the boat for Port Rock. And I won't
be able to see you till then."

"Not till to-morrow night?"

"I has to be at the dry dock early in the morning or they can't start
work. Good-night." He was holding his hat very stiffly in one hand. The
other hand he extended to her.

"Good-night," the woman said, and took his hand and clung to it.
Suddenly she lifted it to her lips and sobbed.

A woman crying and kissing his hand, and all done so suddenly he
couldn't stop it--Jan was shocked at himself. "Sh-h!" said Jan. "Sh-h!
You mustn't."

"I will. You're the first man ever came to the house who didn't look at
me as if I was a streetwalker. And he tried his best to make me one. And
I fought him--and fought him; but not a soul to help me. And a woman
can't hold out forever. I'd 'a' killed myself, but I was afraid to die
that way. I was beginning to weaken when you came. And if you had been
the wrong kind of a man--"

"Sh-h! Don't say things like that."

"But it's so. And you helped me to get over it. Before I was married I
used to dream of a man like you. But what chance had I in the
dance-halls along the water-front and my people dead? And he was a
dance-hall hero, the kind girls used to write notes to. I was never as