er--name, age,
birthplace, street and number of his boarding-house, and that
will be the end of it. But that don't matter--Tommie Clancy,
whatever he is, is a friend of Maurice Blake's. And he means
to speak a word for Maurice.

"For a long time now, Miss Foster, Maurice has thought the world of
you. He never told me--he never told anybody. But I know him. He
waited a long time, I'm sure, before he even told himself--maybe even
before he knew it himself. But I knew it--bunk-mates, watch-mates,
dory-mates we've been. He's master of a fine vessel now and I'm one of
his crew. He's gone ahead and I've stayed behind. Why? Because he's
carried in his heart the picture of a girl he thought could be all a
woman ought to be to a man. And that was well A man like Maurice
needs that, and maybe--maybe--you're all that he thought and more
maybe, Miss Foster. Wait--he had that picture before his eyes all the
time. I hadn't any picture. Years ago, when I was Maurice's age, I
might have had something like it, and now look at me. And why? Why,
Miss Foster, you're a woman--could you guess? No? Think. What's
running in a man's head, do you think, in the long winter nights when
he's walking the deck, with the high heavens above and the great,
black rolling sea around him? What's in his head when, trawls hauled
and his fish aboard, when the danger and the hard work are mostly by,
his vessel's going to the west'ard? What when he's an hour to rest and
he's lying, smoking and thinking, in his bunk? What's been in
Maurice's head and in his heart all the years he's loafed with the
likes of me and yet never fell to my level? Anything he ever read
anywhere, do you think, or was it a warm image that every time he came
ashore and was lucky enough to get a look at you he could see was true
to the woman it stood for? When you had no more idea of it than what
was going on at the North Pole he was watching you--and thinking of
you. Always thinking of you, Miss Foster. He never thought he had a
chance. I know him. Who asks a woman like you to share a fisherman's
life? Is it a man like Maurice? Sometimes--maybe with the blood
racing through him after a great race he might. A while ago he did,
Miss Foster. And what gave him the courage?

"Listen to me now, Miss Foster, and say what you please afterward.
Maurice and I are friends. Friends. I've been with him on the bottom
of a capsized dory when we both expected we'd hauled our last
trawl--with the seas