Buckwheat had fallen asleep and been awakened by the
strangling sulphur fumes. We in the high place had been smoked out
by our rascals like so many rats.
It was Wada who had opened one of the doors. The old steward had
opened the other. Together they had attempted the descent of the
stairway and been driven back by the fumes. Then they had engaged in
the struggle to repel the rush from for'ard.
Margaret and I are agreed that sulphur, excessively inhaled, leaves
the lungs sore. Only now, after a lapse of a dozen hours, can we
draw breath in anything that resembles comfort. But still my lungs
were not so sore as to prevent my telling her what I had learned she
meant to me. And yet she is only a woman--I tell her so; I tell her
that there are at least seven hundred and fifty millions of two-
legged, long-haired, gentle-voiced, soft-bodied, female humans like
her on the planet, and that she is really swamped by the immensity of
numbers of her sex and kind. But I tell her something more. I tell
her that of all of them she is the only one.
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