A Marriage at Sea by W. Clark Russell

It was some time after three o'clock in the morning when Grace fell asleep. The heave of the vessel had entirely conquered emotion. She had had no smiles for me; the handkerchief she held to her mouth had kept her lips sealed; but her eyes were never more beautiful than now with their languishing expression of suffering, and I could not remove my gaze from her face, so exceedingly sweet did she look as she lay with the rich bronze of her hair glittering, as though gold-dusted, to the lamplight, and her brow showing with an ivory gleam through the tresses which shadowed it in charming disorder.

She fell asleep at last, breathing quietly, and I cannot tell how it comforted me to find her able to sleep, for now I might hope it would not take many hours of rest to qualify her as a sailor. In all this time that I had been below refreshing her brow and attending to her, and watching her as a picture of which my sight could never weary, the breeze had freshened and the yacht was heeling to it, and taking the wrinkled sides of the swell -- that grew heavier as we widened the offing -- with the sheering, hissing sweep that one notices in a steam launch. Grace lay on a lee-locker, and as the weather rolls of the little _Spitfire_ were small there was no fear of my sweetheart slipping off the couch. She rested very comfortably, and slept as soundly as though in her own bed in times before she had known me, before I had crossed her path to set her heart beating, to trouble her slumbers, to give a new impulse to her life and to colour, with hues of shadows and brightnesses what had been little more than the drab of virgin monotony.