My Shipmate Louise, Volume III

At four o'clock the carpenter came aft to relieve me. He asked me in a short off-hand way how the weather had been; and the wide-awake note in his voice satisfied me that whether or not he had slept during his watch below, he had certainly not now come fresh from his bunk or hammock. When I had answered him, he went abruptly to the compass, and I descended the poop ladder and entered the cuddy.

Miss Temple was still asleep. It was more like some issue of the sorcery of the imagination than the reality to come out of the windy dusk of the night and an association, momentary it might be, with the carpenter, to the spectacle of the slumbering beautiful girl breathing deep and restfully, with the gleam of her white teeth showing through her parted lips, and the lashes of her closed lids resting in a shadow of surprising loveliness upon her colourless cheeks. But rest was imperative to me; there was not another locker to use; and I would not leave the girl alone. I lightly touched her hand; she smiled, but slept on; I touched her again, and she sprang erect with an affrighted air, staring at me with the meaningless gaze of the newly awakened.