a shirt-sleeved elbow hooked over the
back of his chair. Mrs. Hermann was sewing alone. As Falk stepped over
the gangway, Hermann's niece, with a slight swish of the skirt and a
swift friendly nod to me, glided past my chair.

They met in sunshine abreast of the mainmast. He held her hands and
looked down at them, and she looked up at him with her candid and
unseeing glance. It seemed to me they had come together as if attracted,
drawn and guided to each other by a mysterious influence. They were a
complete couple. In her grey frock, palpitating with life, generous of
form, olympian and simple, she was indeed the siren to fascinate that
dark navigator, this ruthless lover of the five senses. From afar I
seemed to feel the masculine strength with which he grasped those hands
she had extended to him with a womanly swiftness. Lena, a little pale,
nursing her beloved lump of dirty rags, ran towards her big friend; and
then in the drowsy silence of the good old ship Mrs. Hermann's voice
rang out so changed that it made me spin round in my chair to see what
was the matter.

"Lena, come here!" she screamed. And this good-natured matron gave me a
wavering glance, dark and full of fearsome distrust. The child ran
back, surprised to her knee. But the two, standing before each other in
sunlight with clasped hands, had heard nothing, had seen nothing and no
one. Three feet away from them in the shade a seaman sat on a spar, very
busy splicing a strop, and dipping his fingers into a tar-pot, as if
utterly unaware of their existence.

When I returned in command of another ship, some five years afterwards,
Mr. and Mrs. Falk had left the place. I should not wonder if Schomberg's
tongue had succeeded at last in scaring Falk away for good; and,
indubitably, there was a tale still going about the town of a certain
Falk, owner of a tug, who had won his wife at cards from the captain of
an English ship.

THE END

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