ot need brandy. He was ever careless."

"He was foolhardy more than careless."

"I never thought that he knew the currents and the coast, as a man
should know it who has life and goods to carry safe."

"He had best be with his crew; every man of it was a better man than
he is."

Snorro let them talk and wonder. He would not tell them where Jan was.
One group succeeded another, and hour after hour Snorro stood
listening to their conversation, with shut lips and blazing eyes.
Peter looked at him with increasing irritability.

"Art thou still sick, Snorro?" he asked at length.

"Not I."

"Why, then, art thou idle?"

"I am thinking. But the thought is too much for me. I can make nothing
of it."

Few noticed Snorro's remark, but old Jal Sinclair said, "Tell thy
thought, Snorro. There are wise men here to read it for thee; very
wise men, as thou must have noticed."

Snorro caught something in the old man's face, or in the inflection of
his voice, which gave him an assurance of sympathy, so he said: "Well,
then, it is this. Jan Vedder is evidently a very bad man, and a very
bad sailor; yet when Donald Twatt's boat sunk in the Vor Ness, Jan
took his bonnet in his hand, and he put his last sovereign in it, and
he went up and down Lerwick till he had got L40 for Twatt. And he gave
him a suit of his own clothes, and he would hear no word wrong of him,
and he said, moreover, that nothing had happened Twatt but what might
happen the best man and the best sailor that ever lived when it would
be God's own time. I thought that was a good thing in Jan, but no one
has spoke of it to-day."

"People have ever thought thee a fool, Snorro. When thou art eighty
years old, as Jal Sinclair is, perhaps thou wilt know more. Jan Vedder
should have left Twatt to his trouble; he should have said, 'Twatt is
a drunken fellow, or a careless, foolhardy fellow; he is a bad
sailor, a bad man, and he ought to have gone to the bottom.'" Then
there was a minute's uncomfortable silence, and the men gradually
scattered.

Peter was glad of it. He had no particular pleasure in any conversation
having Jan for a topic, and he was burning and smarting at Tulloch's
interference. It annoyed him also to see Snorro so boldly taking Jan's
part. His indignant face and brooding laziness was a new element in
the store, and it worried Peter far beyond its importance. He left
unusually early, and then Snorro closed the doors, and built up the
fire, and made