Slowly she began to take off the suit that Josné had made so cleverly and so quickly. She threw it down on the floor of the cabin and then, taking the first dress she found in the cupboard, slipped it on.

She loved El Diablo and she could think of nothing else and was scarcely conscious of what she did or even of seeing her own reflection in the mirror of her elaborate dressing table.

When she had changed, she went from her cabin to stand for a moment outside the one opposite, half afraid to go in.

She was still there when Captain Maclean opened the door.

“Is – is everything all right?” she stammered.

He came out into the passageway, closing the door behind him.

“Ay, he’ll be all right. It’s better than I hoped, but the poor man’s in pain just now. I have given him something to make him sleep. Don’t go in, for he won’t recognise you and there’s no call for you to be upsetting yourself.”

“It won’t upset me,” Skye said, but without conviction, for she knew that Captain Maclean was well aware why she had gone from the room while he dressed the wounds.

“There’ll be doctors in Montevideo who will set him on his feet again,” he said cheerily. “We should be there by noon tomorrow at the very latest.”

He turned towards the companionway and then, as he reached it, he turned back again.

“Can you tell me the gentleman’s name?” he asked.

Skye hesitated.

“He is sometimes referred to as – ‘El Cabeza’,” she said at length.

“And by another name as well,” Captain Maclean added with a twinkle in his eye and she knew that he was well aware of the identity of her guest.

She waited until he had gone above and then went quietly into the cabin where El Diablo lay. The curtains had been drawn, but the light percolated through them.

Evans was sitting by the bedside and he rose as she entered.

She motioned to him to sit down again. He was a small wiry man, older than he looked and had been at sea all his life. He had, as Skye well knew, hands that could be as gentle as any woman’s and she personally would rather have been nursed by Evans when she was ill than by anyone else she had ever met.

She saw that Captain Maclean and Evans had got El Diablo into bed. There was a bandage round his forehead and bandages covered his wounded shoulder, but the other shoulder showed naked above the soft linen of the sheet.

His skin was very white and Skye remembered as she looked at it that he was British.

She walked across and stood close beside the bed, looking down at El Diablo. There was a little more colour in his face than there had been earlier on.