ss between two round black eyes
and a red mouth full of yellow teeth, one cheek was covered thickly with
lather, and the other, already shaved, was smeared with blood.

"What's the matter?" said the bosun.

"Where's the watchman?" asked Mr. Spokesly.

"He's down here talking to me."

"What are you doing, shaving?"

"Of course I am. What did you think I was doing? Cutting my throat?"

"Looks damn like it," muttered Mr. Spokesly, and sauntered away aft to
look at the shore. The indignant apparition in the forecastle scuttle
gradually sank from view like the phantoms in old-fashioned grand opera,
and was replaced by a lumbering creature in a blue jersey, with curling
blond hair, and carrying a bucket of soap-suds. Mr. Spokesly heard him,
presently, banging about in the galley.

There was a seat aft near the hand-steering gear, one of those
old-fashioned affairs with curiously moulded cast-iron ends and
elaborate teak slats, and he sat down there with the telescope to his
eye watching the dark mass of trees and roofs where Mr. Dainopoulos
lived. Except for a street lamp shining among the trees and an
occasional blue spit from a trolley-car, he could discern nothing. Even
the room where Mrs. Dainopoulos usually lay was not lighted. It was just
about this time that Mr. Spokesly reached the lowest point of his
confidence. The magnetism of Evanthia's personality, a magnetism which
made him feel, in her presence, that she was capable of achieving
anything she desired, and which is sometimes confused with the faculty
of command, was wearing away in the chill, dark emptiness of the night.
There was a quality of sharp and impersonal skepticism in the air and in
those glittering shore-lights beyond the black and polished surface of
the Gulf. There was now no wind; the evening current and breeze had
faded away, and both the water and the air were hanging motionless until
the early morning, when they would set eastward again, to bring the
ships' bows pointing towards the shore. And it was slack water in the
minds of men floating on that dark and sinister harbour. There were
other men sitting and looking towards the shore, men whose nerves had
been worn raw by the sheer immensity of the mechanism in which they were
entangled. They were the last unconsidered acolytes in a hierarchy of
hopeless men. They had no news to cheer them, for the ships sank a
thousand miles away. They endured because they were men, and the noisy
lies tha