in of years
of family life and tell her your own scandalous history, and she will
amaze you by her serene acceptance of your infamous proceedings. So
perhaps, as I say, I missed nothing very piquant after all. I had to
content myself with the eloquent silence of the respectable but single
Tonderbeg, moving about in the cabin, his blond head bent in gentle
melancholy, his features composed into an expression of respectful
forgiveness.

"'But what was your idea, Fred?' says Jack to me on the road home. He
wore habitually a mystified air when we were alone together in his
cabin. Jack had become settled in life. His movements had grown more
deliberate, and his choleric energy had mellowed into an assured
demeanour of authority. You could imagine him the father of a young
lady. He sat back in his big chair, motionless save for the cigar
turning between thumb and finger, a typical ship-master. He was
recognized by the law as competent to perform the functions of a
magistrate on the high seas. He no longer plunged like an angry bull
into rows with agents. He had arrived at that period of life when all
the half-forgotten experiences of our youth, the foolish experiments,
the humiliating reverses, come back to our chastened minds and assist us
to impose our personalities upon a world ignorant of our former
imperfections. And he sat there turning his cigar between thumb and
finger, his bright and blood-shot brown eyes fixed in a sort of
affectionate glare upon me, his old chum, who had suddenly left him
spiritually in the lurch, so to speak. 'What was your idea, Fred? Do
you mean to say you hadn't made any plans for the future at all? Just
going to let the thing slide?' And the curious thing about his state of
mind was that he was attracted by the idea without understanding it. As
he sat watching me, mumbling about the future, and the taking of risks
and what people at home would say, it was obvious that he was beginning
to see the possibilities of such an adventure. He had a vague and
nebulous glimpse of something that was neither furtive sensuality nor
smug respectability. 'Like something in one of these here novels,' as he
put it with unconscious pathos. And that, I suppose, was as near as he
ever attained to an understanding of the romantic temperament. It was
fine of him, for he got it through a very real friendship. 'I know you
wouldn't do anything in the common way, Fred,' he observed after a long
contemplation of his cig