CHAPTER IV. AND LIKE A DREAM DISSOLVED
Before the woman had time to speak a thunderous step was heard on the companion stairs, and Le Farge broke into the saloon. The man’s face was injected with blood, his eyes were fixed and glassy like the eyes of a drunkard, and the veins stood on his temples like twisted cords.
“ Get those children ready!” he shouted, as he rushed into his own cabin. “Get you all ready—boats are being swung out and victualled. H--l! where are those papers?”
They heard him furiously searching and collecting things in his cabin—the ship’s papers, accounts, things the master mariner clings to as he clings to his life; and as he searched, and found, and packed, he kept bellowing orders for the children to be got on deck. Half mad he seemed, and half mad he was with
