murmured Mac, and looked at us in the growing dusk. Bill
rose to get dinner.

Throughout the meal we refrained from any comment. Now that he had
materialized, there was no reason, in the nature of things, why we
should bother our heads any more about him. In the most natural way he
had appeared and innocently demolished the photo-play romances we had
constructed about him. It was a warning to us to avoid nonsense, in
future, when discussing our neighbours. Miss Fraenkel had fared no
better. Evidently he was not "held" for something with which his wife
had "got away." We were all ridiculously wrong and ought to be ashamed
of ourselves. And so we were; avoiding mention of him, and devoting our
attention to the fish, for it was Friday, and we kept it religiously.

But as I drank my coffee and listened to that exquisitely mournful
_barcarolle_ from the _Tales of Hoffmann_, the whole episode took on a
different aspect. I perceived, as Schopenhauer had perceived a hundred
years before me, that our first judgment upon a man or principle is
probably the most correct. I saw that I had been carried away by logic
and numbers and had discounted my first impression. From the angle at
which I now regarded Mr. Carville I could see that, after all, his case
presented certain details which we could not as yet account for.
Unfamiliar as I was with the life of the sea, I felt instinctively that
men who had their business in great waters would bear upon their persons
indications of their calling, some sign which would catch one's
imagination and assist one to visualize their collective existence. But
Mr. Carville had nothing. I passed in mental review the details of his
appearance, his blue serge suit, his dark green tie, his greying
moustache, clipped short in a fashion that might be American, English,
French or German. His voice had been quiet and deferential, but by no
means genteel; nor had it any hint of the roystering joviality of a
sailor. More than anything else his gait, in its sedate unobtrusiveness,
seemed to me utterly at variance with the rolling swagger which we
conventionally associate with seamen.

Grant, however, I said to myself, that he looks a truth-telling man.
Grant that he is, as his children said, at sea. Surely there is
something romantic in this quiet-eyed man being married to such a woman
as Mrs. Carville! Surely a man whose children bear names so bright on
the rolls of fame must have something in him worthy of