and
conferred concerning bills, letters and accounts. She was calm and
impersonal during these interviews, and he tried to be so. There was no
reference to other matters and no more cheerful and delightful chats, no
more confidences between them. It did seem to him that she was more
absent-minded, less alert and attentive to the business details than she
had been, and at times he thought that she looked troubled and careworn.
Perhaps, however, this was but his imagining, a sort of reflection of
his own misery. For he was miserable--miserable, pessimistic and pretty
thoroughly disgusted with life. His health and strength were gaining
always, but he found little consolation in this. He could not go to sea
just yet. He had promised Judge Knowles to stick it out and stick he
would. But he longed--oh, how he longed!--for the blue water and a deck
beneath his feet. Perhaps, a thousand miles from land, with a gale
blowing and a ship to handle, as a real deep-sea skipper he could
forget--forget a face and a voice and a succession of silly fancies
which could not, apparently, be wholly forgotten by the middle-aged
skipper of an old women's home.

One morning, after a troubled night, on his way to a conference with
Elizabeth at the Fair Harbor office, he met Mr. Egbert Phillips. The
latter, serene, benign, elegant, was entering at the gateway beneath the
swinging sign which proclaimed to the other world that within the Harbor
all was peace. Of late Captain Kendrick had found a certain flavor of
irony in the wording of that sign.

Kendrick and Phillips reached the gate at the same moment. They
exchanged good mornings. Egbert's was sweetly and condescendingly
gracious, the captain's rather short and brusque. Since the encounter in
the office where, in the presence of Elizabeth, Phillips' polite
inuendoes had goaded Sears into an indiscreet revelation of his real
feeling toward the elegant widower--since that day relations between
the two had been maintained on a basis of armed neutrality. They bowed,
they smiled, they even spoke, although seldom at length. Kendrick had
made up his mind not to lose his temper again. His adversary should not
have that advantage over him.

But this morning to save his life he could not have appeared as
unruffled as usual. The night had been uncomfortable, his waking
thoughts disturbing. His position was a hard one, he was feeling
rebellious against Fate and even against Judge Knowles, who, as Fate