Wreckage

The man had been desperately ill in soul and mind and body. And now in some curious manner the ocean seemed to be making him physically better but spiritually worse. Something, too, in the horizonwide waste of waters was having a sinister effect on his brain. The grey daylight of early May, bitter as December--the utter desolation, the mounting and raucous menace of the sea, were meddling with normal convalescence.

Dull animosity awoke in a battered mind not yet readjusted to the living world. What had these people done to him anyway? The sullen resentment which invaded him groped stealthily for a vent.

Was THIS, then, their cursed cure?--this foggy nightmare through which he moved like a shade in the realm of phantoms? Little by little what had happened to him was becoming an obsession, as he began to remember in detail. Now he brooded on it and looked askance at the girl who was primarily responsible--conscious in a confused sort of way that he was a blackguard for his ingratitude.

But his mind had been badly knocked about, and its limping machinery creaked.

"That meddling woman," he thought, knowing all the time what he owed her, remembering her courage, her unselfishness, her loveliness. "Curse her!" he muttered, amid the shadows confusing his wounded mind.

Then a meaningless anger grew with him: She had him, now! he was trapped and caged. A girl who drags something floundering out of hell is entitled to the thing if she wants it. He admitted that to himself.