at this, a murmur in which even Mr. Marsh
joined, for he "could see a joke" as he often admitted. And as the meal
progressed and the excellent red wine passed, the young man revealed a
nimble mind, like quicksilver rather than firm polished metal, which ran
easily over the whole surface of life and entertained them with the
aptness and scandalous candour of its expression. To most of them, men
like Esther's husband, Mr. Jokanian, who had absorbed European ideas
through books, so that they had fermented within him in a black froth of
pessimism and socialistic bubbles, he was a blond angel from heaven. "A
man of remarkable ideas," he observed to Mr. Spokesly, who nodded.

"Remarkable is right," he muttered. He found himself withdrawing
instinctively from the highly charged intellectual atmosphere of this
community. As he ate his supper and drank the wine, he allowed his mind
to return to his own more immediate affairs. It might very well be that
civilization and even humanity would die out, but the urgency of the
problem was not apparent to a man about to go out on a hazardous
adventure with the woman he loved. Only that day he had worked with Mr.
Cassar, the engineer, who had been making a silencer for the motor. Not
that Mr. Spokesly was going to depend upon that. He had a mast and a
sail, for he knew the wind was off shore and easterly during the night,
and he could save his engine for the time when they had made the outer
arm of the Gulf. Mr. Cassar agreed because he thought they might be
short of gasolene in spite of the carefully stored supply. For Mr.
Cassar had decided to go with his commander. It had been borne in upon
Mr. Cassar that the family in Cospicua, for whom he was industriously
providing, might perish of starvation while he grew rich beyond the
dreams of avarice, if he could not send them any money--as he obviously
could not so long as he remained where he was. Mr. Cassar was not at all
clear as to the causes and extent of the war. All he knew was that he
now earned more money, and he naturally hoped it would go on as long as
possible. But he also knew enough of war to realize the limits set upon
enterprise, just as at sea one had to submit to the ways of the
elements. And he had inherited a placid contempt for everything Ottoman,
which minimized in his mind the difficulties of departure. And it may
have been also a sudden desire to see his wife in Cospicua. She had
written him, in a mixture of Maltese