umble and
sud of the water lit here and there with the gleam of a port light.

Cleo de Bromsart had fascinated him, grown upon him, compelled him in
some mysterious way to ask her to marry him. He had sworn after his
disastrous first experience never to marry again. He had attempted to
break his oath. Was he in love with her? He could scarcely answer that
question himself. But this he knew, that her refusal of him and the
words she had said were filling his mind with quite new ideas.

Was she right after all in her statement that he who fancied himself a
man of the world knew nothing of the world except its shams? Was she
right in her statement that love was a bond between two spirits, a bond
unbreakable by death? That old idea was not new to him, he had played
with it as a toy of the mind constructed for the mind to play with by
the poets.

The new thing was to find this idea in the mind of a young girl and to
hear it expressed with such conviction.

After a while he came forward and went up the steps to the bridge.
Captain Lepine was in the chart room, the first officer was on the
bridge and Bouvalot, an old navy quarter-master, had the wheel.

"We have slowed down," said the Prince.

"Yes, monsieur," replied the first officer, "we are getting close to
land. We ought to sight Kerguelen at dawn."

"What do you think of the weather?"

"I don't think the weather will bother us much, monsieur, that blow had
nothing behind it, and were it not for these fog patches I would ask
nothing better; but then it's Kerguelen--what can one expect!"

"True," said the other, "it's a vile place, by all accounts, as far as
weather is concerned."

He tapped at the door of the chart room and entered.

The chart room of the _Gaston de Paris_ was a pleasant change from the
dark and damp of the bridge. A couch upholstered in red velvet ran along
one side of it and on the couch with one leg up and a pipe in his mouth
the captain was resting himself, a big man of the Southern French navy
type, with a beard of burnt-up black that reached nearly to his eyes.

The Prince, telling him not to move, sat down and lit a cigar. Then they
fell into talk.

Lepine was a sailor and nothing else. Had his character been cut out of
cardboard the line of division between the sailor and the rest of the
world could not have been more sharply marked. That was perhaps why the
two men, though divided by a vast social gulf, were friends, almost
chums.