"It is very difficult," I said, "to distinguish the fact from the fiction, not because he is extraordinarily skilful in 'joining his flats,' but because he is so absorbed in the story himself that it would be quite inconceivable to him that anyone would not be interested. He has evidently never imagined such a contingency. Such ingeniousness is more than uncommon. It is sublime."

"How about your theory that he is an artist?" argued Mac. "He can't be both conscious and unconscious of his art."

"Yes, he can," I replied. "All great artists are. Mind, I don't pretend that Mr. Carville is a great artist. I merely state the fact that he has one of their attributes. I account for it this way. We have here a man of undeniable powers but limited ambition. At certain periods in his life he has been crossed by his remarkable brother, a man whom we now know to have not only brain-power, but will-power. This brother has impressed himself upon our neighbour's imagination. You noticed almost admiration in his voice at times as he spoke of his brother? It has been his whim, therefore, to accentuate as much as possible the difference between them. He has, moreover, cultivated the habit of reticence. Thrown by his profession among men of shrewd wit but imperfect delicacy of mind, he has kept himself to himself. In the course of years it has been almost necessary for him to speak. I can imagine him, a man of quick perceptions, and no mean gift of expression, finding silence becoming an agony. Much brooding has bitten the real and fanciful details of his life into his mind. He has, quite by accident, discovered in us a singularly acceptable audience. Without conscious premeditation he has told us his story. Every narrator of the most trivial incident can induce you to listen for something naive and individual in his utterance. Most of us disperse this quality over our days. Mr. Carville has secreted it, distilled it to a quintessence, and the result is—well, something in his tone and manner quite unusual."

"Yes, that's all right enough," assented Mac, "but I still don't quite see how his brother couples-up with that chap Cecil wrote about."

"Well, I don't either," I replied, "but you must remember that Mr. Carville has told us so far only of the past. In his narrative he is not married. That must be at least eight years ago, a long time in the life of a man like his brother."

"I'll write to Cecil," said Bill suddenly, with one of her flashes. "Wouldn't that be a good plan?"

"Excellent!" I exclaimed. "We ought to have thought of that before. He will be tremendously interested."

This was a true prophecy. Some three weeks later, on a day in the middle of November, we received a bulky letter with a Wigborough postmark on a two-cent stamp. The excess, I recall, was nine cents, gladly paid by me while Bill was tearing off the end of the envelope.

"Yes," she said, scanning the sheets quickly, "it seems to be. Here——"

We adjourned to the studio. Mac seated himself before a half-finished cover for the Christmas Number of Payne's Monthly, Bill took up a leather collar-bag destined to be Cecil's Yule-tide present, and I began to read.

"High Wigborough, Essex.

"MY DEAR BILL,—Many thanks for your jolly letter. I write at once to tell you how awfully interested I am in what you tell me. It really is a most extraordinary thing, though, as you know, it often happens. On the very day your letter arrived I met Carville again! Without any warning I heard the chuff-chuff of a motor in the lane, and saw him walking up to the door. I asked him in, of course. He sniffed and coughed a good bit, because I was biting a big plate, and the fumes are pretty thick even with nitric acid. He wanted to know all about what I was doing. Of course I explained, asked him to sit down and have a drink, and for a time we got on very well. I said I supposed he was touring, and he remarked:

"'Oh, no. I'm living down here just at present,'

"'What, broke again?' I asked laughing. He looked at me in that fiery damn-your-eyes way of his and then joined in the laugh. 'No,' he said, 'experimenting. I've taken up flying.'

"He said it just as you might say, 'I've taken up tennis.' He gives you the impression that if he remarked that he had taken up cathedral-building or unicorn-breeding, you would believe him. A most remarkable man!

"I said, 'Oh, I've heard something about your people, I believe, Carville,' and took up your letter. He put his whisky down on the floor (he was sitting in my low window seat) and glared at me. 'At least,' I said, funking, you know, 'I see it's the same name.' And I went on to tell him how I'd been so impressed with my first adventure with him that I'd written to you about it. He held out his hand for the letter. I just sat and watched him. He read the whole thing rapidly, his eyes going back again and again to some parts of it; and then he gave it back to me.

"'So that's where he is, eh?' he said, and smiled. He took out a pocket-book and made a note of the address.

"'Who,' I said.

"'Charley, dear old Charley,' he said, 'I haven't seen him or heard from him for years.'

"'Then it is your brother?' I asked. He nodded.

"'He always was a bit of a duffer,' he said. 'What's N. J.?' he asked suddenly.

"'New Jersey,' I replied, 'in the United States.'

"'Oh,' said he, 'I thought it meant New Jerusalem. It would be like Charley.'

"He shut up his pocket-book and said no more about it. Cool, eh? I wanted to ask him no end of questions about his past life, but didn't care to. He was ready enough to talk of his experiments though, and asked me to go over to Mersea Island to see his shop. 'Thanks, I will some time,' I said. 'Come now!' he rapped out, and that was what I did. Took the plates out, washed my hands, and scarcely remembered to stopper the acid-bottle. Away we went, tooling through Peldon at about seventy miles an hour. He is certainly a superb driver. Down our lane that big car of his brushed the hedge both sides, but he never slackened at all, either in his speed or his conversation. He had several wealthy people interested, he said, and he was going to do something really big in the flying line. We were nearly flying at the time. Of course, there aren't many people about this part of Essex, but it really was risky. He said this London-to-Paris and London-to-Manchester business was all 'tosh,' he was going to beat that easily. We crossed Mersea Island, turned in at a five-barred gate, and rushed up a hundred-yard plank-road that he had put down.

"It is a curious place he has there. A big shed of creosote-boards and felt roof, in the shape of a letter L, and at the side a small lean-to affair where he lives. One leg of the L is a workshop with an oil-engine to drive it; the other is for his plane, and opens at the end on the plank-road. As we came up a tall chap in a yellow leather suit all smeared with oil came out and I was introduced to his friend D'Aubigne. Can you believe it, old girl—D'Aubigne and I were in Paris together! He had a thing in the Salon the same year as I did, but having money he chucked Art and went in for motoring. We knew each other at once. It shows you what a small and sectional thing fame is, for while he had never heard of me, I was equally ignorant of his tremendous importance as an authority on aerial statics. Never heard of aerial statics before, for that matter! Carville seemed quite pleased I knew D'Aubigne, and showed no hesitation in turning me over to him.

"Well, I went all over and it was really very interesting. The position seems to be this. D'Aubigne has tons of ideas and patents and can make no end of improvements in aeroplanes, but he has no nerve. Several times, he told me, he had had narrow squeaks. Now Carville, so D'Aubigne says, has a head like a gyroscope. He doesn't know what fear is. Seeing what I had of him, I can quite believe it. So having met some years ago in Venice (D'Aubigne seemed frightfully amused at something that had happened in Venice) when Carville suddenly found himself able to command a large capital, he had D'Aubigne over, and between them they are going to boom a new long-distance machine. D'Aubigne's admiration of Carville almost amounts to worship. He told me that when Carville went over his place at Avranches, he spent about ten minutes looking over a monoplane, and then climbed into the seat. 'Set it away,' he said. D'Aubigne was perplexed. 'This won't carry two,' he argued. 'No,' said Carville, 'I'm going to try it by myself. Set it away.' I have told you how domineering he is. D'Aubigne started the engine, and, so he says, crossed himself. Carville was off, and in another minute he was heading for St. Malo. D'Aubigne says some of his volplanes were agonizing to watch. When he turned he went out over, the sea, but it seems this was not because he was afraid of falling, but because he wanted to get a nearer view of a steam yacht riding off Granville. He came down on the shingle and smashed the thing badly, but he was busy studying the wreck when they came up to him. It never occurred to Carville to cross himself. D'Aubigne is a big yellow-haired Norman, and his eyes fairly goggle when he gets going on Carville. Personally I believe they've both been bad eggs in their time. When I spoke to him of your letter he pulled down the corners of his mouth and wrinkled his nose. 'Ah!' he said. 'It's quite possible. Many things happen to men like Carville. You know he was in the war with the Boers?' I said, no I didn't, and he told me that Carville had rushed to South Africa, just as thousands of others had done. He, however, had the devil's own luck; saved an officer's life, a man in the Imperial Yeomanry, named Cholme. Cholme was a pal of Belvoir's at Charterhouse. It seems Cholme gave Carville a letter to Lord Cholme, in case anything happened, you know. Something did happen and Cholme was killed at Spion Kop. Carville never got a scratch. When he came home he took the letter to Lord Cholme, and the old chap told him to ask what he liked. The old man is a pretty rough employer (he owns The Morning), but he had a royal way with his son. Carville said he didn't want anything, but might have a favour to ask some day. Well, it seems it was an interview with Cholme that he was after when I met him in Huntingdonshire, but he has his own ideas of the way to do these things. He approached Lord Cholme, not with a begging-letter, but with a proposal to finance this aeroplane scheme. Cholme jumped at it, D'Aubigne says.

"We were standing in the workshop watching a young chap fitting a piece of a new engine, when we heard the roar of the aeroplane. Carville had started his engine before opening the doors. It was deafening. We got outside just in time to see him leave the ground. He made straight for the sea. D'Aubigne says he always does make straight for the sea. He may come back from over Dengie Flats or St. Osyth, but he always makes for Gunfleet and Kentish Knock Lightship at first.

"D'Aubigne went into the drawing-office where he works out his calculations and all that, and he got out a flask of Benedictine. Over this, he told me some rather startling things about Carville. D'Aubigne knows nothing about the girl you say is called Rosa, but in addition to a dozen other more shadowy creatures, he says there is a Gladys not far off, a thin girl of about thirty. Of course, D'Aubigne is a Frenchman and takes the French view, but it certainly seems to be a fact that Carville makes a hobby of women.

"Since then I have seen him frequently. Sometimes he and D'Aubigne come over to tea with me, and if I would let them they would take me for long spins across England. They work in spurts, and then shut the place up for a day and tear round the country. Once I heard the roar of a car, and looked out in time to see Carville rush past, and there was undoubtedly a girl with him. Once, too, I saw him in the air, far away over Layer Marney, going towards Colchester. D'Aubigne says their machine will be ready soon. As far as I can make out, whatever they do, The Morning is to have exclusive information.

"Do you know, it suddenly struck me that an aeroplane lends itself extraordinarily well to etching? Carville missed the plank-road one day in landing, and I saw the machine lying with a list in the field near a rick. I made some notes, and when it is finished I'll pull a proof and send it to you. I fancy it will be rather good. In the clear transparent afternoon light of a late October day, with the rick behind it, the great vans sprawled out over the hedge, the corrugations of the engine, the thin lines——Do you see it? I think very highly of it. An aeroplane has a personality, like Carville.

"Well, now you must send me news of your side. I wish I could tell you what he is going to do, but D'Aubigne says that is a secret. One thing he has told me, and that is that they are going to fit the machine with a wireless telephone so that he can talk to The Morning office while he is flying. Wonders will never cease!

"I like Mac's colour prints. The effect of the sky over the steamer is quite topping. Where painting in oil on a copper plate seems to fail is in the detail. The colour spreads so. The red port light of the vessel is much too large. However, I shall certainly spoil some paper trying to out-do Mac.

"Kind regards to all. Write soon, "Yours ever, "CECIL."

As I folded up the sheets and thrust them into the envelope, Mac looked across at me. Seeing that I had no inkling of his thought he remarked with some slight irritation:

"Wonder when the deuce that chap's coming back?"

"Where's he gone?" asked Bill, holding up the collar bag to see the effect.

We did not even know that.

"Oh," I said, "Mediterranean, I suppose."

To us the Mediterranean is a far-off beautiful dream. We sat trying to visualize for ourselves the incredible fate of visiting the Mediterranean as we might take the cars for Broadway. I heard Bill sigh softly. Mac's voice, when he spoke, was gruff.

"I'd ask the kids if I were you," he said.

"I can do that," I agreed dreamily.

Sometimes, it must be admitted, we get homesick. It generally happens when we have letters from home. We felt rather keenly then, the shrewd poignancy of Mr. Carville's description of himself as an alien. But to us it implied a subdued if passionate desire to see again the quiet landscape of England. The painter-cousin's sketch of the aeroplane near a rick, sunk in the ditch by a hedge, in the clear transparent afternoon light of late October, appealed to us. To see a quickset hedge again ... we sighed.

No doubt we would have allowed the daily flow and return of life's business to oust our neighbours' fortunes from our minds, and waited patiently for Mr. Carville's reappearance, had not a most exciting game of cow-boys, a game in which I for the nonce was a fleeing Indian brave, led to an abrupt encounter with Mrs. Carville. Benvenuto Cellini's scalp already hung at my girdle, visible as a pocket-handkerchief; and he lay far down near the cabbages, to the imaginative eye a writhing and disgusting spectacle. The intrepid Giuseppe Mazzini, however, had thrown his lariat about me with no mean adroitness, and I was down and captured. This thrilling denouement was enacted near the repaired fence, and any horror I may have simulated was suddenly made real by the appearance of Mrs. Carville, who had been feeding her fowls. When one is prone on the grass, a clothes-line drawn tight about one's arms, and a triumphant cow-boy of eight years in the very act of placing his foot on one's neck, it is difficult to look dignified. The sudden intrusion of an unsympathetic personality will banish the romantic illusion.

It may be that the sombre look in Mrs. Carville's face was merely expressive of a doubt of my sanity. For a grown man to be playing with two little boys at three o'clock of a Tuesday afternoon, may have seemed bizarre enough in her view. To me, however, endeavouring to disengage myself from my conqueror and assume an attitude in keeping with my age and reputation, her features were ominously shadowed by displeasure.

"If I disturbed you," I said courteously, "I am sorry."

She put her hand on the paling and the basket slid down her arm. She seemed to be pondering whether I had disturbed her or no, eyeing me reflectively. Ben came up, no longer a scalped and abandoned cow-boy, but a delighted child. Perhaps the trust and frank camaraderie of the little fellow's attitude towards me affected her, for her face softened.

"It's all right," she replied slowly. "You must not let them trouble you. They make so much noise."

"No, no," I protested. "I enjoy it. I am fond of children, very fond. They are nice little boys."

They stood on either side of me, clutching at my coat, subdued by the conversation.

"You have not any children?" she asked, looking at them. I shook my head.

"I am a bachelor," I replied, "I am sorry to say."

"That accounts for it," she commented, raising her eyes to mine. I agreed.

"Possibly," I said. "None the less I like them. I suppose," I added, "they ought to be at school."

"There is measles everywhere in the school," she informed me. "I do not want it yet."

"Mr. Carville," I said, seizing an opening, "told me he did not believe in school."

"That is right," she answered. "He don't see the use of them. Nor me," she concluded thoughtfully.

"That is a very unusual view," I ventured.

"How?" she asked vaguely.

"Most people," I explained, "think school a very good thing."

"It costs nothing," she mused and her hand fell away from the paling. The two little boys ran off, intent on a fresh game. I scanned her face furtively, appreciative of the regular and potent modelling, the pure olive tints, the pose and poise of the head. Indubitably her face was dark; the raven hair that swept across her brow accentuated the gloom slumbering in her eyes. One unconsciously surmised that somewhere within her life lay a region of unrest, a period of passion not to be confused with the quiet courtship described by her husband.

"True," I assented. "By the way, is Mr. Carville due in port soon?" She turned her head and regarded me attentively.

"No," she said. "Do you wish to see him?"

"Oh, not particularly," I hastened to say. "He was telling us some of his experiences at sea, you know. It was very interesting."

"I do not like the sea," she said steadily. "It made me sick ..."

"So it did me. But I enjoy hearing about foreign lands; Italy, for instance."

"This is all right," Mrs. Carville replied in the same even tone. "Here."

"And he will be back soon?" I said, reverting to Mr. Carville.

"Saturday he says; but it may not be till Monday. If bad weather Monday ... Tuesday ... I cannot tell."

"I see," I said. "I hope we shall see him then. He was telling us ..." I paused. It occurred to me that she would hardly care to be apprised of what her husband had been telling us—"of his early life," I ended lamely.

"Of me?" She asked the question with eyes gazing out toward the blue ridge of the Orange Mountains, without curiosity or anger. I felt sheepish.

"Something," I faltered. She turned once more to glance in my direction. I was surprised at the mildness of her expression. Almost she smiled. At any rate her lips parted.

"He is a good man," she said softly, and added as she turned away, "Good afternoon."



CHAPTER XI

MR. CARVILLE SEES THREE GREEN LIGHTS

As happens on occasion the weather changed with dramatic suddenness in the last week in November. One might almost imagine that our august emperor of the seasons, the Indian Summer, protracting his reign against all the wishes of the gods, stirring up the implacable bitterness and hatred of winter, had gone down suddenly in ruin and death. I remember well the evening of the change. I had spent a tiring day in New York, working gradually up Broadway as far as Twenty-third Street. Seen through the windows of the Jersey City ferryboat, the prow-like configuration of lower Manhattan seemed to be plunging stubbornly against the gale of sleet that was tearing up from the Narrows. The hoarse blast of the ferry-whistle was swept out of hearing, the panes resounded with millions of impacts as the sleet, like thin iron rods, drove against them. An ignoble impulse led me to join the scurrying stampede of commuters towards the warmth and shelter of the waiting-room. There is something personally hostile in a blizzard. In the earthquake at San Francisco there was a giant playfulness in the power that shook the brick front from our frame-house and revealed our intimate privacies to a heedless mob. There was a feeling there, even at the worst, when the slow shuddering rise of the earth changed to a swift and soul-shattering subsidence, a feeling that one was yet in the hands of God. But in a blizzard one apprehends an anger puny and personal. There is no sublimity in defying it; one runs to the waiting-room. And once there, nodding to Confield, who sat in a corner nursing his cosmopolitan bag, pressing through the little crowd about the news-stand, I found myself urging my body past a man wearing a Derby hat and smoking a corn-cob pipe. I had a momentary sense of gratification that even a seasoned seafarer like Mr. Carville should feel no shame in taking shelter from the inclement weather.

"Good evening, sir," he said imperturbably. "Homeward bound?"

"Sure," I said, putting down a cent and taking up the Manhattan Mail, an evening journal of modest headlines. "I suppose you are coming out, too?"

"Yes," he said, as we turned away, "I've come up from the ship. We only got in this morning."

"You are late," I agreed. "Mrs. Carville said you might be in on Saturday, and here it is Wednesday."

He gave me a quick glance.

"Oh! Did she tell you? Yes, we had several bad days after passing Fastnet. The Western ocean is bad all over just now."

"I suppose you were sorry to leave the Mediterranean."

"It was Bremerhaven this time," he replied, striking a match. "Near Hamburg, you know. They change us about now and again."

"What is your cargo?" I asked.

"I thought you knew," he said, surprised. "I'm on the Raritan, an oil-tank. Standard Oil, you know. I quite thought you knew."

"I had intended to ask you," I said, "but it is a delicate subject. One cannot very well ferret for details of a stranger's business."

"That's the genteel view, I know," he said, smiling. "There's something to be said for it, too."

"You will come in and finish your story?" I ventured.

"Well, I did think of looking in some time...."

"After dinner to-night?"

"Much obliged. It passes the time."

We went out and climbed into the Paterson express. We are rather proud of this train in a way, for it is the only one of the day which confines itself to stations when contemplating a stop. I narrated to Mr. Carville an incident of the preceding winter when a commuter of Hawthorne, on our line, stepping out one snowy night, found himself clinging to the trestles of the bridge over the Pasayack River, and the train vanishing into the darkness. Mr. Carville laughed at this, and remarked jocosely that he was "safer at sea." We discussed for some time the comparative merits of English and American railroads, Mr. Carville expressing the fairly shrewd opinion that "conditions so different made any comparison out of the question."

"After all," he remarked, "leaving out London, which has more people in it than Canada and Venezuela put together, what is England? From an American point of view, I mean. Simply Maryland!"

I appreciated this. Often during my sojourn in America, I had pored over maps and vainly endeavoured to form some conception of so gigantic a territory. I had failed. I had come to the conclusion that minds nurtured in the insular atmosphere were forever incapable of visualizing a continent. In my fugitive letters to friends at home I had been reduced to the astronomer's facile illustrations. "Just as," I had written in despair—"just as a railway train, travelling at a mile a minute, takes nearly 180 years to reach the sun, so we, travelling in a tourist car at rather less than a mile a minute, took an apparently interminable period to reach the sun of California!" It was a poor jest, but excusable one whose clothes, ears, mouth, eyes and nose were full of cinder-dust, excusable in a disdainful Britisher so far from home. To Englishmen, who had never seen a grade-crossing, a desert, or a mountain, and for whom a short night-journey on smooth rock-ballasted lines suffices to take them from one end of their country to the other, my figure was vague enough, no doubt. Some day, when I go back, I shall try to explain.

"Yes," I said, "exactly—Maryland."

I was more than ever reinforced in my already-expressed opinion that Mr. Carville was a man of more ability than ambition. There was to me something bizarre in his deliberate abstention from any contact, save books, with the larger intellectual sphere to which he by right belonged. His naive confession of culture showed that he was aware of his latent power, but I was not sure whether he had ever realized the stern law by which organs become atrophied by disuse. We had reached our station and were struggling up Pine Street through rain and wind before I ventured to hint at my concern.

"Ah!" he said. "I daresay you're right in a way. But——" The wind blew his voice away, so that he seemed to be speaking through the telephone, "——I've a family to think of."

We parted at the door, and I hurried to tell the news to my friends. They smiled when I spoke of Mr. Carville.

"We've had news, too," said Bill, helping me to spinach. "A paper from Cecil."

"Copy of The Morning," added Mac. It is a rule of the house that there be no papers on the table, so I possessed my soul in patience until after dinner. My cigar going well, and Mac thundering the "Soldiers' Chorus," from Faust, on the piano, I opened the paper which Bill handed to me. To be honest, I was a little startled. The chief item on the news page was headed:

AEROPHONE MESSAGE FROM CARVILLE; OVER HELIGOLAND; ALARM IN GERMANY.

Copyright by The London "Morning."

The special article of the day was headed: "The Napoleon of the Air; a Character Sketch," and the leader, signed by Lord Cholme himself, was a paean, in stilted journalese, in praise of the Morning's enterprise in encouraging invention.

"The Empire," wrote Lord Cholme, "can no longer afford to pass by one of her most brilliant sons. In the light of his magnificent achievement, the daring of a Peary, the nerve of a Shackleton, the indomitable persistence of a Marconi, dwindle and fade. We do not hesitate to say that since the capture of Gibraltar, the Empire has secured no such chance for consolidating her paramountcy in Europe. The present is no time for hesitation or delay. Mr. Carville is master of the situation. By his message from the air, three thousand feet above Heligoland, in full view of German territory, to the office of The Morning, he has demonstrated the efficiency of his machine. If that is not sufficient, Mr. Carville's next journey will convince Europe, if not England. If the pettifogging Radical Government turn a deaf ear to our brilliant correspondent, if they ignore his claims and chaffer in any commercial spirit with his accredited agents, their days are numbered. It is hardly too much to say that the days of the Empire are also numbered...."

* * * * *

Apart from our own private interest in the affair, the news did not thrill. In America one's withers are unwrung by such scares. The "exclusiveness" of Lord Cholme's information, indeed, defeated his object. Lord Cholme, I knew, was loved neither in Fleet Street nor in Park Place. His ruthless competition with the news agencies, his capture of numerous cable-routes, had gradually divided England into two classes: those who read The Morning and those who didn't. Everyone remembers the exclusive description of the destruction of Constantinople in The Morning. No one was surprised to find that the following day Constantinople was still alive and well. Clever young Oxford men who had not succeeded in getting a post on The Morning, satirized the paper in other journals who never paid more than two guineas a column. No doubt, having been a newspaper man myself, I discounted the effect of the scare upon the public. I could imagine the delicate raillery of the other papers, if indeed they deigned to notice Lord Cholme's exclusive information at all.

The special biography was as accurate as such biographies usually are. It was written in a fair imitation of Mr. Kipling's racy colloquial style and contained numerous references to the Empire, the White Man's Burden and our "far-flung battle line." I suspected that Monsieur D'Aubigne had supplied the basic "facts" which had been edited by Lord Cholme before being handed on to "Vol-Plane," as the biographer called himself.

I set the paper down and resumed my cigar. The drums and tramplings of Lord Cholme's organ had revealed nothing fresh. I understand now why my friends had merely mentioned the fact of its arrival and made no comment. After all, our real interest lay in the man, not in his aeroplane. We had never seen an aeroplane except in the cinema films, but we were familiar enough with current events to feel no surprise that a man had flown over the North Sea. I think I expressed our mutual sentiment when I observed that Cecil's story of how Frank Carville won his bet, and Mr. Carville's own account of the voyage from the Argentine to Genoa, told us far more about the man than "Vol-Plane's" highly-paid hack-work.

We had been but a few minutes in the studio before Mr. Carville knocked and Mac ran down to admit him. We heard the rumble of voices while our visitor discarded his coat; comments on "the change," and then footsteps on the stairs. I went to the door to welcome him.

He was standing on the landing, appraising with a quick eye the Kakemonos and prints that covered the distempered walls. We are rather proud of our "Japs," as Bill calls them. I even tried to learn something of the language from the "boy" who was our servant in San Francisco. He was not a scholarly boy, and he told lies in English, so that it is possible his tuition was of no value. I remember Bill was ironic because, when Nakamura was dismissed in ignominy, and wrote on the kitchen wall for the benefit of his successor, I was unable to decipher the message.

"Do you care for this sort of thing?" said Mac. "That's original," pointing to a fine Hiroshige.

"I used to," replied Carville, feeling for his pipe. "I was a good while in that trade—coal from Moji to Singapore. I think they're best at a distance though—the people, I mean."

Mac protested against this "narrow" view.

"Yes, yes, I know," said Mr. Carville, coming into the studio. "I read Lafcadio Hearn when I was younger; read him again out in Japan. Humph!"

Whether his characteristic ejaculation referred to Hearn or the studio I cannot determine. His interest was obvious, but it was interest, not of a connoisseur, but of a man looking round another man's workshop. Von Roon used to say in Chelsea, "There is hope for him who looks with attention upon his neighbour's tools." Mr. Carville sank slowly into a chair, his eyes fixed upon a recent nude study.

"We haven't any Scotch, but if you care for Rye——" said Mac, reaching for a tray on the throne.

Mr. Carville's eye lost its vague, reflective expression as it fell upon the tray.

"Ah?" he said, "I'd rather have good Rye than—than—well, you know what most of the Scotch is here. No—no water, thanks. I take it as I find it."

It was a new facet of his character, this. We watched him swallow the neat spirit at a gulp and place the empty glass on the tray without emotion. Mac and I sipped gently and waited for Mr. Carville to begin.

"I've been rather worried just lately, with one thing and another," he observed, putting away his little brass tobacco-box. "Second went home to get married last trip, and the Third, promoted, you understand, needs an eye. Very willing and all that, but he's been in these big hotel-ships, Western ocean all his life, and as I say, he needs an eye. I was telling you about my brother, if I remember."

We murmured that he had, and watched Mr. Carville's obvious enjoyment of his pipe.

"Ah!" he said, "the Brignole station in Genoa. Humph!"

"You see, my brother has something in his make-up that appeals to a woman. I was going to say, all women. There's something spectacular, you might say, in the way he carries on. I've never been able to decide whether it's intentional or just fate. Anyhow, there it is; and if you look at it in that light, it isn't so very wonderful after all that a girl like Rosa was then should have been dazzled and carried away. When she jumped up and stood staring at me, I hardly knew what to do. 'Rosa!' I said, and we stood facing each other for a while. I don't know; but I think we got to know each other better just then. For me, at any rate, it was a revelation. They say a drowning man sees all his past life while the water is pressing on his ear-drums. Something like that happened to me then in that dismal, badly-lighted booking-hall. It wasn't love, in the sugary sentimental sense, that I felt for Rosa; but a blind, helpless sort of an emotion, a feeling that if I didn't get her I was lost—lost! I put out my hands as though I was catching hold of something to hold me up ... I felt her hands.

"I can hardly remember how we went away from there. I know the driver shouted to me as we came out and I went up and paid him. And then we were in the Piazza Corvetto, sitting on a seat, near where the trolley-cars stop. How long we sat there I don't know either. I knew I'd got her again. She was there, alongside, and we were talking, like two children. I was very glad ... you know."

He paused, and we went on smoking and sipping, and Bill bent her head over her needlework. I thought with a sudden and revealing vividness of the woman who had said to me, in her gentle Italian voice, "He is a good man." I think we were very glad too, though we did not say so.

"I can't tell you," he went on evenly, "whether my brother intended to take her away with him and was prevented by some accident, or whether he had changed his mind. I think he intended to. I can tell you what I did myself. Before I left Genoa I married Rosa. She wanted it. She did not trust herself. There are men like that. Women cannot trust themselves unless some man will trust them.

"When we sailed out of Genoa bound for Buenos Ayres, I was a married man, and Rosa had a flat in Via Palestro. I thought I knew my brother well enough to feel sure that I needn't fear him any more. That's the strange part of a business like that. To Rosa, to me, it was life or death; to my brother it was the amusement of a few hours, days, perhaps a week. It's a queer world.

"I think it was about two years after that before I saw my brother again. When the war in South Africa started we were outward bound in ballast for Buenos Ayres. At Monte Video we received orders to go to Rosario and load remounts for Cape Town. It was a big business; I believe the owners built three new ships out of the profits of that charter. When we got up the river those bony Argentine cattle were waiting for us and run aboard in a few hours. No time for boilers or overhauling engines or anything. Straight out again, due east, with a crowd of the toughest cattlemen I ever saw before or since. There was no peace or quiet on the ship at all. They were not professional cattle-deck tenders at all, you see. They only took the job to get to the Cape, where the trouble was. Most of them deserted and drifted up country. Each trip we had to get a fresh team. I can't say I enjoyed my life very much during that charter. It was hard luck, though nothing out of the way for a sailor-man, to go off the Genoa run now I was married, and had a wife there.

"I saw my brother soon after Cronje was captured at Paardeberg. I was ashore in Cape Town one evening taking a walk with the Second, just to get out of sight of the ship for an hour, when he pulls my sleeve and says he:

"'I say, Chief, you remember that new mess-man you got in B. A.? That Lord? Well, ain't that him over there. You remember, don't you? That chap who won the lottery in Genoa that time. Look!' He pointed across the street to a party of chaps in khaki walking along and slapping their legs with their canes. The tallest man and the finest-looking of the lot was my brother. I couldn't be mistaken, though it would be difficult to say exactly why. It was his air.

"He did not see me, but I turned away and went into the first saloon for a drink. I wanted to be away from him and I wanted a drink. I had a panicky feeling about him. While the Second recalled all the incidents of 'that new mess-man's' career on board, I was thinking that perhaps we were destined to cross each other all our lives, that go where I would, I shouldn't be able to avoid him. You see how a man's imagination will run away with him. I ought to have thanked God he was in South Africa and likely to get himself shot fighting for his country instead of going after women. When I was safe aboard the ship again I began to see how I had been frightened. For it was fright and nothing else that turned me into that saloon to avoid my brother. I thought of him rushing up to the Brignole station at the last second and looking round for Rosa, and finding her gone. He would know I'd had something to do with it. He would swear to find her some day, swear in one of his hot, short passions, passions like a West India hurricane that whips and crashes and smashes everything around for a minute or two.

"I used to think a lot about him on the voyage back to Buenos Ayres. I don't know what he was in, in the war, though the Second, whose brother was a driver in the Artillery, said he was in the Mounted Infantry uniform. Everybody was Mounted Infantry in those days. To me it seemed strange that Frank should go out to the war, but I've come to the conclusion he really felt the call. There was the excitement too. The old bad Irish blood comes out in the love of a row.

"In Buenos Ayres I had a letter from Aunt Rebecca. Rosa had a baby, but it was dead as soon as born. The old woman said I'd better come home. I remember walking up and down the bridge-deck that night, thinking things out under the stars. I knew Rosa would like to go to England. They hear so much about Inghilterra in Italy. For them it is a land where lords and ladies walk about the streets and give pennies to poor people all day long. Then again, I was not only in need of a holiday, but I was able to afford one if I was careful and kept down expenses. To take a holiday in England, with Rosa! To see it as though it was all fresh! The fancy took strong hold of me. I saw myself going through St. Paul's, the Tower, Monument and Westminster Abbey, as an alien. I saw the hungry landlady in the Bloomsbury boarding-house trying to rook me. 'Bloomsburys' have a very bad name in Italy among educated people. I read an article in the Stampa—very humorous it was. Humph!

"I talked it over with the Skipper next day. It is a strange thing to me how men value one sentiment and underrate another. If I'd gone to the Old Man and said, 'I want to go home, Captain, and see my wife,' he would have asked me if I was crazy. But as soon as I said—showing him the black-edged letter—that the kid was dead, he pulled a long face and said he'd see the agents at once. I wrote to my old uncle in London explaining matters. The Second got his step and they got a new Fourth off a meat-boat of the company's that was loading at the time. When I was paid off I took my dunnage and bought me a second-class ticket for Genoa on a Rubattino boat.

"To a certain extent I had no reason to be dissatisfied with my success in life. Many a man has done worse at thirty-three. I was married; I had money in the bank; I could eat and drink and sleep well; I enjoyed reading and smoking. Beyond that, I have grown to think a man need not go. For you gentlemen, of course, it's different. You are out for fame. You work at high and low pressure, whereas I work in a vacuum, so to speak. I thought a good deal about life on that voyage to Genoa as a passenger. It was a new experience to me, I can tell you. For the first day or two I was lost. There seemed nothing to do. I'd walk up and down the promenade deck listening to the beat of the twin-engines, wondering if the Second was a good man ... habit, you see? And then I found a little library abaft the smoking-room full-up with leather-bound books that nobody wanted to read. They were Italian, of course, for it was an Italian ship, and it struck me that I'd have some fun rubbing up my knowledge of the language. For let me tell you that colloquial Genoese doesn't take you very far into Dante or Boccaccio! I think that was one reason why Rosa had disliked the idea of living in Italy. Although I didn't notice it much, being a foreigner, her speech was not refined. How could it be, down on the Via Milano with Rebecca for a teacher? Well, I started in and every day I worked my way through a chapter or two. Perhaps it is because I know modern Italian writing so well—for a foreigner—that I don't take much stock in all these great men English and Americans boom so. They seem to me smart Alecks, but the high-pressure men are Latins. I can't help thinking, after reading the modern men, that they are like the transformers in an electric power-plant. The Latins are the generators of ideas, and these other chaps are transformers. They reduce the voltage, lose a lot in leakage, but are useful because they make the current available to the small man. It's a rather technical illustration, but that's what I mean.

"Two men, or two books if you like, took a great hold of me on that voyage—Mazzini's Duties of Man and Cellini's Life. I suppose they are about as far apart as any two books—or men—could get. You may laugh at the notion, but I found myself in sympathy with both! Mazzini appealed to my mind, Cellini to my imagination. If Ruskin had stuck to his last as Mazzini did, he might have made a revolution in England. I'm not a Socialist, never was, any more than Mazzini, and there was something fine to me about the way he told these boiling, ignorant, weak-minded mobs of Italian workmen that they had duties as well as rights. There's too much talk of rights nowadays. Anybody would think that because a man works with his hands and takes wages, he's free to do as he pleases. I remember the Old Man once when I had trouble with a fireman. 'All I want is justice!' says the man, putting his dirty hand on the chart-room door. 'Justice!' roars the Old Man. 'By God, you dirty bone-headed Liverpool Irishman, if you had justice you'd be in irons, that's where you'd be.' Humph!

"I think I took to Cellini because in a way he reminded me of my brother. He got away with it every time! The idea of doing anything, or not doing anything, because it was against the law or custom, never entered his head! Very few people who read Cellini realize that there are men like him now. Every bit. They don't write about themselves, that's all. There will always be a certain number of men of his kidney, a sort of seasoning for the rest of us. They fear nothing and they reverence nothing ... Strong men!

"All day and every day I'd sit away astern reading these books, and gradually an idea took shape in my mind. It was this. It was my duty to have a family, since my brother had turned out so. More than that, it was my duty to give them a chance, when they came. I could not see how I was to do that in England. I can't see it now. England to me is on the crumble. Emigration has dug away the outside of the walls and revolution is digging away inside. For men like Belvoir, men who have been to public-schools and Oxford, and have a private income, it will be comfortable enough for a long time to come. But it is on the crumble. When I thought of my children I never pictured them grown up in that genteel snobbish life that I'd been brought up in. No!

"And I knew that Rosa still had her dislike of Italy. What should we do? Suddenly it occurred to me that since my father had come from America, I could go back there. I believe in this country, and it's going on ten years since I first came. There's something electric in the air over here, a feeling that things grow. My boys will have a chance here ... I think.

"That was one part of the idea. The other was to name my boys after those two men. It may be only fancy, but I think names have an influence, you know. A father's fancy—let it go at that! I'd like somehow to have one of my boys an artist, and watch him grow. I used to dream about the future on that lazy voyage to Genoa. Every man does at times. Pipe-dreams, you know.

"Rosa was out and about when I reached the Via Palestro. She fell in at once with my plan to take a trip to England. We stopped at Paris for a day or two to look round and buy things, and then on to London. I found a quiet little private boarding establishment in Tavistock Square, where we lived cheap and comfortable. A penny bus took us almost anywhere. I'd been fancying myself with Rosa going about as a stranger, and if you'll believe me it was almost a fact! London had changed very much since I'd been in Victoria Street. You'll notice that if you go back now. Same as New York; one can hardly recognize some parts of it now. I did enjoy that time. Rosa was so pleased with everything she saw. It was May, you see; London in May. We used to go down to Chelsea and watch the boats on the river, and see the people in the grand houses on the embankment, going out in their automobiles.

"Gradually the idea that my brother would come across me again got fainter and I didn't encourage it. I heard nothing of him. My uncle, who had retired, down at Surbiton, told me he had not seen him for years. We agreed that it was best to leave him to his own devices. I didn't take Rosa down. Somehow I didn't see her catching on to my uncle and cousins. They were a little too genteel for her.

"For the same reason I didn't take her to Clifford's Inn when I went to see Miss Flagg, the woman Gladys had lived with. Miss Flagg was there, much the same as before, with her flat and peculiar furniture and her untidy dress. She was so glad to see me and hoped I'd got another book to print. Humph! She told me she didn't see Gladys very often nowadays; had a flat of her own in Fulham. My brother had crooked his finger, and away she ran. Miss Flagg told me all about it, how Gladys had taken to paint—on her face I mean—and gone to the devil generally. I'll say this for Miss Flagg, she never used anything to add to her beauty, much as she needed it. We were going on very nicely when I happened to mention I was married, and all the light went out of Miss Flagg's face. She was finished with me. You see, even when they're after votes, they're just the same. I left her and took Rosa to the Zoo in the afternoon. I enjoyed that, and so did she.

"After about three months of this sort of thing, I began to hanker for the sea again. You may wonder at that, but it's a fact. It grows on men, me for one. I felt lost without the beat of the engine, you know. So I applied for several jobs, and finally the builders of the ship I'm on now, the Raritan, wanted a chief to take her out to New York. I got the job and we went to Sunderland to join her. Since then I've been crossing and recrossing the Western Ocean. And speaking in a general way, that's all there is to it."

Mr. Carville, pinching his shaven chin with a thumb and fore-finger, looked down meditatively at his boots. In some subtle way his manner belied his words. I felt a lively conviction that there was in a particular way something more to it. It seemed quite incredible that he had no more to tell us of his brother.

"Surely," I said, "you have heard of your brother since?"

He gave me a quick look.

"That's right," he said. "I have. I was going to tell you about it. I saw him, fifteen days ago, in the North Sea."

"Great Scott, did you really?" exclaimed Mac, and he picked up the copy of The Morning. "Look here!"

Mr. Carville took the paper and read the news without exhibiting any emotion. I saw his eyelid flicker as he glanced down the special article by "Vol-Plane." Lord Cholme's concern for the Empire seemed to leave him cold.

"Humph!" he remarked and handed the paper to Mac, remaining lost in thought for a moment.

"Ah!" he said at length. "That certainly accounts for him. But it doesn't say anything about the three green lights."

"What green lights?" I asked, little thinking that I should see these same lights myself in the near future.

"I'll tell you," said he, and looked round for a place to knock out his pipe. I passed him the ash-bowl that Mac brought back from Mexico when he went down there to do a bird's-eye view for a mining company. Mr. Carville held it up to examine the crude red and blue daub on the pale glaze.

"I suppose," he began, "that of all the meetings I've had with my brother, this last one was the most unusual. It was unusual enough, that time in the Parque Colon, when he grabbed my neck in the dark; but this last meeting beats that, I think. It's funny how a quiet, respectable man like me should have such experiences, isn't it?

"I ought to explain that the Raritan, like all oil tank steamers, has her engines aft. The captain and mates live amidships under the bridge, while we engineers all live in the poop, under the quarter-deck, as they call it in the Navy. There is a long gangway between the two houses, but as a general thing we live apart. We have our own pantry and steward and we can go straight out of our berths into the engine-room without coming on deck at all.

"It was the second night after we left Bremerhaven that this happened and about ten minutes after eight bells, midnight. I keep the eight to twelve watch with the Fourth, you see, and it often happens that I don't feel like turning in right away. It was a clear yet dark night without a ripple on the sea. It had been one of those calm days that we have in English waters in winter time, a pale sun shining through a light haze, cold yet pleasant. I'd seen the Third tumble down the ladder and heard the Fourth put his door on the hook. Down below there was the quick thump of the engines, the rattle of the ashes being shovelled into the ejector, and the click of oil-cup lids as the Third went round the bearings. Everything seemed in fair trim for a quiet night. I walked up and down the deck for a spell, finishing my pipe, and then I was standing by the stern light, an electric fixed on the after side of the scuttle. A good way to the westward was the Kentish Knock Lightship. I was leaning against the bulkhead, smoking and thinking of things in general, you may say, and wondering what the Second would do next, when I saw three green lights, very low on our starboard quarter. I don't think I was much struck by them at first. Might have been a trawler. The Second Mate told me afterwards that after the Old Man had gone down he saw a green light and thought it was the Harwich and Hook-of-Holland mail-boat. He was half asleep or he'd have wondered where her mast-lights were. I took very little notice, I say, until it struck me that, so far from being a trawler, those lights were moving a good deal faster than a mail-boat. Sometimes I could see only one light. I began to wonder what it was and I stepped down to my room to get my binoculars. I remember the mess-room was dark, and across the table and floor was a narrow bar of light from the Fourth's door. As I came up the stairs I heard a peculiar droning sound, as though the Third had let the dynamo run away. I turned round intending to go down below, when I saw the green lights coming up fast ... fast.

"As my foot touched the deck the wings were overhead and I saw the long body and flat tail. To me, for I'd never seen an aeroplane close before, it was a wonderful sight. I put the glasses up and watched it slide away in the dark, dropping until it seemed to skim the water. 'So that's an aeroplane!' I said to myself. And I saw it wheel round and the green lights came into view again, rising, I remember. I was a bit excited and leaned over the stern rail. I had never realized before how a man might feel while flying. I'd always looked at the pictures as rather Jules Verney, you might say; improbable and far-fetched. But here it was, coming up on us again, much more wonderful than any picture! We were doing about twelve knots, and I suppose that machine was coming up at thirty. Just above the big triangle of three green lights was a blue spark snapping, and in the shadow between the wings the shape of a man. I stood there watching, watching, feeling nervous because of that peculiar drone that the propeller made, when all of a sudden it stopped and the whole thing swooped down to within twenty feet of the awning-spars. I stepped back a little and looked straight up. In the wink of an eye he was gone, but I saw him, and he me. As he swerved away to clear the funnels, I heard him give a great shout of laughter that rose to a small scream: ''Pon—soul—it's—Char—ley!' he sang out, and dropped away astern. I heard his engine begin again, a note like an insect; and he fled away towards Gunfleet. And that was all!

"I stood there dazed for a moment. In spite of the suddenness of it, I don't think I had any doubt it was my brother. I saw his big hook nose sticking out of his fur cap between the horrible goggles, his body craning forward under the wings. And the voice, the wailing, sneering, screaming laugh, 'Charley!'—that was him right enough. My brother!

"I stepped along the gangway to the bridge, just as the Second Mate took the telescope from his eye and laid it in the rack. He saw me and leaned over the rail beckoning.

"'Say, Mister Chief, what the blazes was that?' he whispered.

"'Didn't you see it?' I asked. I knew he had been dozing on the lee side of the chart-room.

"'See it! I heard something!' he says. 'Was it you calling Charley?' His name's Charley, you see; Charley Phillips.

"'No,' I said. 'I didn't see anything. You must have been asleep, Mr. Phillips.'

"He looked at me, rather raw about the gills, took a look at the Gunfleet Light and bent down again to me.

"'Did you see anything?' He waved his hand towards the Essex coast. 'Yes,' I said. 'Green lights.'

"'Oh, that was the Harwich boat,' he says. 'I know that. She's gone. Must have been going twenty-two knots.'

"'It was an aeroplane,' I said, whispering, 'flew past.'

"'Eh!' says he. I said it again. He straightens up and takes a turn up and down the bridge.

"'You'd better watch out,' I said. 'It may come back.'

"'I am watching out!' says he, rather savage. 'I'll take care of all the aeroplanes about, Chief.'

"I went back then and took another look round with my glasses, but I saw nothing but a couple of coasting steamers in shore. I stepped down into the mess-room and looked through the slit of the Fourth's door. Funny coincidence! He was on his settee in his pyjamas, asleep, and on his stomach was a magazine he'd been reading, a magazine with a coloured cover showing an aeroplane dropping a bursting shell on a man-o'-war.

"I lay awake for a long time, listening to the bells, watching Rosa's picture flickering on the bulkhead as the screw below me shook the ship. So we'd met again! I couldn't blame the Second Mate—I've kept the grave-yard watch myself; I couldn't blame Mister Charley Phillips. But what would he have said if I'd told him my brother was on that machine? What if I'd said I'd seen wireless sparks spitting above it? Humph!

"I suppose I must have dozed a little, for the next thing I remember was the whoop of our siren and the engines going dead slow. As I tumbled out to go down it was three o'clock. The Third was standing by the reversing gear and I saw by the vacuum gauge that the temperature of the sea was down to forty-eight degrees. 'Fog, sir?' says the Third. 'Aye,' I said. 'Shut your injection a little. We're off the Goodwins, I suppose.' Everything was all right, so I climbed up to look. The Old Man was out on deck and they were heaving the lead. Every minute the siren gave a mournful whoop and the slow thump of the propeller made me miserable. I leaned over the side, thinking of my brother and his aeroplane. For the life of me I couldn't be sure it wasn't all a dream. The thin whine of the siren sounded very like his cry of 'Charley!' I heard the Old Man bark something, heard the tinkling of the telegraph and the siren bellowed again. We were going full speed astern! Just as I turned away from the bulwarks I saw a green light, the starboard light of a coaster, rush past. I could hear some one shouting through a megaphone on the bridge. She must have been awful close—went past our stern with an inch to spare as we swung. And then all was quiet again as the engines stopped and went ahead dead slow. I went down and got my overcoat and a pipe. The Second was putting on his clothes. 'Ah, you may as well,' I said. 'It's thick all right,' I like a man that don't have to be called.

"All night we crawled along. You see, the Straits of Dover are very like Piccadilly Circus. You never know who you may run against in a fog, it's so crowded and the company is so mixed. About breakfast time the Old Man judged by soundings he was abeam of Dungeness and we went half-speed. The fog lifted about Beachy Head.

"So you see, the fact and the fiction was so mixed up in my mind that by the time we got into the Western Ocean I didn't feel sure which was which. The Second Mate never said a word more about green lights, for if he allowed there was an aeroplane about on the middle watch the Skipper would naturally ask him why he didn't see it. And then what mixed things in my mind still more was my picking up the Fourth's magazine in the mess-room one day and reading that yarn. I was going to tell you about this; but merely to show you how my brother impressed me that I dreamt about him at sea. But now—it seems I didn't dream it after all.

"I'm not surprised," went on Mr. Carville, after a slight pause to stir up the ash in his pipe with a pen-knife, "not surprised. My brother had it in him always. Quite apart from any personal feeling I might have for him or against, I was always prepared, so to say, to see him doing something big. His trouble with his season-ticket and his bigger trouble that put him in gaol were very much on a par. He always had an unconventional way of getting what he wanted. It was no use talking to him; he simply doesn't see what you mean. I—I wonder what he's going to do next."

"He might pay a visit over here," I said tentatively. Mr. Carville gave me a quick glance.

"I shouldn't like that at all," he said, shaking his head. "You see ... I might be away ... I shouldn't like it at all."

He was obviously disturbed, and I felt that the suggestion had been unwise. Obviously it would not do to tell him that his brother knew where he was.

"So far," he remarked presently, "my little boys don't know anything about their uncle. I've no wish that they should. I want them to grow up in this country without any connection with Europe at all. Any debt they owe to Europe can be paid later. My brother couldn't help them at all. And Rosa——"

Mr. Carville stood up to go. The cover for Payne's Monthly caught his eye and he nodded approvingly.

"That's clever," he said. "I wish sometimes I'd gone in for doing things, like you. As you said, a man's mind rusts, gets seized, if it isn't working. I did think of doing something with a few papers I've got in my berth on the Raritan, but—I don't know."

"Why not let me have a look at them?" I said. "I might act as a sort of an agent for you, unpaid of course——"

"Much obliged," said Mr. Carville placidly, "but I don't know as you need bother. I threw a book over the side once."

"A manuscript!" I said, aghast. He nodded, looking at his boots. "I thought a lot of it once; called it Dreams on a Sea-Weed Bed, and got a funny faced little girl in Nagasaki to type it for me. But one voyage, when I'd been reading a book called New Grub Street, I got sick of the whole thing and dumped it in the Java Sea, half way between Sourabaja and Singapore."

"I can't approve of that, Mr. Carville," I said, standing up and confronting him. "A foolish thing to do!"

"How's that? It might just as well be twenty fathoms deep in the Java Sea as twenty volumes deep in the British Museum? Eh! It was mine."

"Oh yes, yes; but it's hardly fair to deprive the world of it."

"Humph! I guess the world won't sweat, sir. It would be a good thing if a lot of modern stuff was dumped. Some of the authors too, by your leave!"

"I quite agree," I said. We had been to see Brieux' Damaged Goods in New York a week or so before, and we were in the mood to sympathize with Mr. Carville's doubt of modern tendencies. He stood by the door of the studio, one hand on the jamb, the other under his coat, the plain gold albert stretched across his broad person, the light shining on his smooth pink forehead as he looked down at his crossed legs. It has occurred to me from time to time that this unobtrusive man, with his bizarre record and eccentric mentality, was evolving behind the mask of his mediocrity a new type. That this process was only half deliberate I am ready to believe. A man who disciplines his soul by flinging overboard the manuscript of a book does not thereby slay his imagination. He only drives it inward. When we first came to America we planted all our seeds in the garden too deep and they grew downward, assuming awful and grotesque forms. In some such way Mr. Carville's imagination was working within him, fashioning, as I say, a new type. I insist upon this, inasmuch as beyond it I have no mementoes of him. Both he and his are gone from our immediate observation, and though we may hear from him again, as a ship passing in the night, a rotund meditative figure pacing the deck of some outbound freighter, so far I remember him mainly by this intellectual inversion. For him the suppression of passion had become a passion; for him individuality was cloaked by the commonplace. In his way he made a contribution to art; he had hinted at the possibilities underlying a new combination of human characters. He had given strange hostages to Fortune, so that Fortune hardly knew what to do with them. It is possible that the abrupt and dramatic disappearance from his life (I refer to his brother) has slackened the intensity of his hold upon this idea; but I do not know.

He left us that evening quietly and without fuss. He had, in a notable degree, the neat movements and economy of gesture which I can imagine indispensable to those who live in confined cabins and take their walks upon decks beneath which their shipmates sleep. In a quiet indescribable way there was manifest in his demeanour a gentle repudiation of all things traditionally English. You could not possibly imagine him vociferating "God save the King" or "Sons of the Sea." With a simple dignity he had assumed the dun livery of the alien, and there was to me a certain fineness in the sentiment that forbade any flaunting of his nationality in the faces of his native-born children.

And in the midst of our musings, just before we turned out the lights, it occurred to me quite suddenly that, since he had finished his story, it was quite possible that we should not see him again.



CHAPTER XII

THE VISION FROM THE KILLS[A]

For a long time that night I lay watching the gem-like glitter of the lights that fringed the eastern horizon. A strong north wind shook the house, sweeping the clouds before it with a contemptuous energy that had in it a promise of frost on the morrow. As the stars rose it was as though the lights of the city themselves were rising into the clear sky, emblems of the vast and serene power that had sent them forth. High above the level constellations soared the two great beacons of the Metropolitan and Woolworth towers, like the masthead lights of some enormous vessel, while away northward, almost hidden by the swinging limbs of our elm, the occulting flash on the Times Building added a disquieting element to the otherwise peaceful scene. For me at least the glamour, the mystery and the beauty of that amazing city had never worn thin. For me, after a day in her roaring streets, after a scramble in her lotteries, there ever comes a recrudescence of that wonder with which I beheld my first view of her from the Jersey shore. The cynical American says, I know not with what truth, that the alien, clutching his bundle and gazing with anxious, frightened eyes toward the mountainous masonry of Manhattan, catching sight of the green sunlit image of Liberty with her benign unfaltering regard, holds his breath and feels within his bosom a fierce but short-lived ecstasy of joy. For one brief instant (I still quote the cynical American) faith and hope flame in his heart and the future lies before him as a shining pathway of industry and peace.

For me, however, the impression that New York had made was neither so unpractical nor so evanescent. For me there was reserved a certain fear of those multitudes and those heaven-kissing towers, an apprehension that even a species of victory after defeat had not sufficed to dethrone. Call it perhaps awe, mingled with homage to the indomitable spirit of the race, rather than fear.

This I felt, and every visit to the heart of the city quickened it, stirring my imagination to some fresh effort, and revealing some new phase of the exhaustless energy of America.

It was only natural that in the course of my musings it should strike me as strange that Mr. Carville displayed no shadow either of reverence or dislike for a place which impressed itself upon me more even than San Francisco or Chicago. It seemed to me strange that a man so sensitive to detail, so conscious of the scant poetry of the commonplace, should have no feeling for that astonishing accident which we call New York City. That he was not aware of her I refused absolutely to credit. If he could feel the beauty of Genoa and the immensity of London, he must necessarily be conscious of the sublimity of Manhattan. I regretted that I had not led him to speak of this. I regretted the possibility of seeing him no more. I felt a pertinacious curiosity about him, as a man who could contemplate with equanimity a spectacle that for me held always an inscrutable problem. To the disgust of the cynical American I always waved aside Washington and even Boston, ignored even that mysterious bourne, the "Middle West," and claimed that he who found the secret of New York had also found the secret of America. As I drowsed that night I registered a vague resolve to see Mr. Carville again and broach the subject to him. I felt sure that in some way or other he would add something to my knowledge, not only of the city, but of himself.

* * * * *

I became aware of Mac's voice in my ear, and struggling to rise, saw that he held in his hand a letter bearing a special-delivery stamp. It is one of the terrors, and no doubt advantages of the American mail, that a letter may descend upon one at unexpected hours. You may be locking up for the night, or enjoying your beauty sleep in the early morn, when a breathless messenger will hammer at your door with a letter, quite possibly containing a bill. Such a missive my friend held over me like a Damocles sword, between thumb and finger, and awaited the news with interest.

It did not, however, contain a bill. It was a request from an advertising agency to proceed to Pleasant Plains, S. I., and interview the president of a realty company who desired what we call tersely enough a "write-up," an essentially modern development of English Literature, in my opinion. Mac maintains with stubborn ingenuity that Doctor Johnson and Goldsmith did "write-ups," just as Shakespeare wrote melodramas, and Turner did "bird's-eye views." I make no such claim. The point is that a write-up brings in fifty dollars, while sonnets are a drug in the market. For this reason I sprang out of bed with unusual alacrity and prepared to catch the eight o'clock express.

"It may mean a 'bird's-eye,'" I remarked, as I bolted my breakfast.

"You can make the suggestion," returned Mac, passing me half a grape fruit. "There's no need to introduce either mosquitoes or ice-floes into a 'bird's-eye.'" This in reference to New Yorkers' objections to Staten Island.

"I shan't mention them in the booklet unless they specially ask me to," I said with a grin. We are always facetious when a new job comes up. I should not be surprised if the immortals were much the same.

Catching the eight o'clock express is with us rather a legend than a solid fact, in spite of our vaunted breakfast at half after seven. One has to shave, collect the necessary papers, put on one's boots, pocket tobacco and matches, run upstairs for a fresh handkerchief, things that somehow or other take time. As a rule we find ourselves halfway to the station, running breathlessly, only to find that we have two left-hand gloves, or that some vitally important document has been left behind. The seasoned commuter, by long and arduous practice, eliminates these errors; but we, who go to New York but once in a week or so, are unskilled in early morning hustles, and generally see the tail-end of the express disappearing in the cutting. This morning, however, I managed to get out of the house by three minutes to eight, sufficient time for an athlete to do the half-mile to the station. With a silent prayer that the train might be a few minutes overdue I raced across the lot and down Pine Street.

I saw, as I hurried down the straight incline of Walnut Avenue, that I was in time, and slackened my pace to a walk. The morning, as I had expected, was clear and cold; a sharp frost had glazed the puddles in the roadway, and on the uplands of the further bank of the Pasayack River light patches of snow lay among the trees. The sun shone gloriously in a blue sky, and a keen wind blew the leaves into swirling eddies about the stoops of the houses. At the bottom of the hill was the station, a small low-roofed structure of wood. Some score of commuters were clustered about it, and I perceived, seated sedately upon a hand-truck, his feet crossed, his corn-cob drawing serenely, and his brown-gloved hands holding a copy of the New York Daily News, none other than Mr. Carville.

He raised his hand in salute as I came up. I hurried into the office to buy a ticket, and the train came in as I came out, the locomotive-bell clanging faintly above the gasp of the air-brakes and the blowing of steam.

"Good morning," I said. "You are away early."

We climbed into the smoker and took a seat not likely to incommode the card-players.

"Ah," said he, smiling, "I expect we'll be going out to-night, you see, and it wouldn't do for the Chief to miss his passage, would it?"

"So soon!" I said, in some surprise.

Mr. Carville gave me one of his quick, good-tempered glances.

"Soon?" he echoed. "Do you know, sir, how long it takes to load the Raritan? Just eight hours. Humph!"

Mr. Carville was fond of using this ejaculation of his in a double sense, if I may say so. As he spoke his eyes were fixed with some interest upon four of our neighbours, who had seated themselves near us and had laid a grey mill-board card-table across their knees. Whether it was the card-table, or the extraordinary speed with which the Raritan was loaded, that excited his amusement, I am unable to decide. I was too familiar with the American habit of gambling in trains to take much notice of it. It is possible that Mr. Carville was less sophisticated.

"That," I said, "does not give you much time on shore."

"No," he said, "it doesn't. Speaking in a general way, we're glad to get to sea. In port, at this end at any rate, it's one continual rush. Shore people have very little consideration for sea-going men. They come and bang at your door any time, day or night. You may be changing your shift—don't matter, in they come. Some business or other. At sea," he concluded, "we do have a little peace."

"Where are you bound for?" I asked, opening my paper.

"Oh, Savona or some Riviera port, I expect. They don't give us our orders till we're off Sandy Hook. You're going to New York, I suppose, sir, on business?"

"Not exactly. I'm going to Staten Island," I replied, "and I believe this is the quickest way."

He regarded me with astonishment.

"Is that so? I suppose you'll be taking the ferry to St. George, then?"

I said that such was my intention, and asked why.

"Why, you see, I'm going that way myself, to Communipaw. The Raritan is lying down there."

"Dear me! It never struck me——" I began. He laughed quietly.

"No," he said, "I don't suppose, if you asked a thousand New Yorkers where such and such a ship was loaded, that more than one could tell you. They know the Lusitania lies somewhere about Eighteenth Street and the Oceanic's next to her, and that's about all. It's the same everywhere. Ask a man in the Strand how to get to Tidal Basin; he won't know what Tidal Basin is, let alone where it is. As for an oil-boat—Humph!"

"I shall have your company, then?" I said. He shrugged his shoulders.

"If you don't object, sir," he said.

"I should like it above all things," I returned. "I was thinking last night that there were many things I should like to ask you, but I was afraid that possibly you might not visit us again for a long time."

"Not at all," he said. "I was very glad to step in. You've got an atmosphere ... if I can call it that. I mean there's something I don't get on a ship, or for that matter, at home ... you understand? Now and again I feel I'd like to talk to people who do understand."

"That reminds me," I said, "that I have been wondering how New York impresses you. I think it is rather wonderful myself."

Mr. Carville smoked silently for a few moments while the card-players pursued their games and the train thundered through the flat swamps of Riverside.

"Have you ever seen it," he asked, "from the Narrows?"

I shook my head. The Campania had come up in a dank fog, when I had arrived seven years before. I mentioned the customs formalities that keep one below at such a time. Mr. Carville smiled gently.

"I always think," he said, "that for an artist, that view is the best, because it's the first. I was looking at that picture in your friend's studio last night; that one of New York from Brooklyn, and I couldn't help noticing how heavy he'd made it. See what I mean? He was too close. The weight of the buildings gets on one's mind. That's the trouble with Americans, anyway. They show you a building and tell you the weight of it, and then the cost of it. Even women are judged by their weight. Only last night I saw in the papers something about a suffragette. They said she weighed one hundred and fifty pounds! I think it is a mistake, myself. Tonnage is all right in a ship; but it doesn't signify much, either in a city or a woman."

Rather astonished, I agreed that this was sound aesthetic doctrine.

"Now," went on Mr. Carville, "if you ask me how New York impresses me, I should say that it reminds me of Venice."

The train stopped at Newark. For an instant I was quite unable to determine whether Mr. Carville was joking or not. One look at his face, however, precluded any such surmise. I waited until the doors banged and the train was moving before I said, "In what way, Mr. Carville?"

"Mind you, it may not impress you in any way like Venice——"

"I regret never to have been there," I interrupted.

"You may," he assented. "You may. A man can do easy enough without ever seeing Naples; but Venice——ah!"

"Yes, I can imagine that," I said, "but in what way——?"

"Well, I'll show you, as you're going to St. George—San Giorgio as you might say"—he chuckled—"and you can tell me what you think."

I fell into a study at this, a study that lasted until the train slid slowly into Jersey City and we joined the throng that were hurrying towards Chambers Street Ferry. I decided to let the matter stand over for the moment. It would not do to act illiberally towards a man who combined a knowledge of seafaring with Italian literature, and who had evidently arrived, however unacademically, at certain original judgments and criteria of life. I offered no remarks as the Erie ferry bore us swiftly across the glittering and congested Hudson to Chambers Street, and I observed that Mr. Carville was absorbed in watching how the vessel was piloted among the traffic. It was natural that his imagination should be stirred by a familiar skill. As we crossed the bows of an incoming liner I saw his eyes sweep over her, keen, critical, appraising. No doubt he saw many things that escaped my landward vision. For me ships are very much alike. I expect he realized this and forbore to bewilder me with matters of technical interest. I have a sneaking appreciation of the mystery and beauty of a ship in full sail on the open sea, an appreciation I scarcely cared to reveal to an engineer. He stood by my side on the upper deck, his corn-cob in his hand, imperturbably observant, a miracle of detached respectability. And he thought New York like Venice!

Nor did we talk very much as we walked quickly down West Street to the Battery. Once he looked at his watch and remarked that he wanted "to be aboard by ten." The sun shone on the water dazzlingly as we rounded the end of Manhattan, showing the hull of the Ellis Island ferry a black mass. The usual crowd of foreigners with their dark eyes and Slavic features, shoe-shine boys, touts and officials waited around the entrance. I put my hand on Mr. Carville's arm.

"Our steamer isn't in yet," I said. "Suppose we see them land."

He glanced up and nodded, and we paused.

As the ferry came alongside the crowd gradually drew together more closely, and some, who had been sitting in dejection on the seats, rose and joined us. A tall policeman walked to and fro, keeping us back, bending his head to listen to a woman with a baby. Young men in flashy button-boots and extravagantly-cut clothes chuckled among themselves, while two serious-looking men talked German, an endless argument. Above us the Stars and Stripes fluttered and snapped in the breeze, and the trains on the Elevated Road crawled carefully round the curve. Now and again the deep bellow of a steamer's whistle smote on our ears, smears of sound on the persistent roar of the city behind us. The feet of the little crowd shuffled as they shifted to get a better view, and two boys, chewing gum, climbed on the seats and stood up. A small girl of ten or so sped past on roller-skates, uttering shrill cries to a companion beyond the grass-plot. And then the gates opened and they came out to us, a little flock of frightened animals, each with his ticket pinned on his breast, each looking round for an instant as sheep do when let out of a pen, instantly herded by officials in peaked caps. A big, unshaved man in a black sheepskin cap opened his arms and the woman with the baby hurried to him. A smart girl behind us pushed through and went up to a sullen-looking old man with a Derby hat and a high-arched nose. The boys on the seat exchanged ribaldry that drew the eyes of the tall policeman to them, and they vanished. The little crowd of aliens began to move towards the East Side and we followed as far as the Staten Island Ferry. I turned to Mr. Carville, thinking he might have some comment to make. He shrugged his shoulders and drew out his little brass tobacco-box.

"Humph!" he said. "They've got it all to come," and began to pare the tobacco into his hand. I could detect no sympathy in his tone, only a grim humour and contempt for the credulity of those trembling peasants now hurrying to their doom. And as I thought of this, quite suddenly he began to talk of his brother.

"I've often wondered what Frank would have made of all this," he said, waving his hand towards the sweep of the Brooklyn Bridge. "Not that I'd like him to come near me and mine, but just out of curiosity, I've wondered."

"I should say he would be likely to get on well," I said.

"You're right—he would! He would take hold right away and as they say here get away with it. He's a citizen of the world, is Frank. He'd be on Fifth Avenue or in Sing Sing within a twelvemonth. But there's no need for him to come to America. He's fallen on his feet again apparently in London. I hope he stops there."

"You seem to have some secret fear of your brother, Mr. Carville——" I began.

"Secret? There's nothing secret about it, sir. I'm scared of him. You don't know him, so you can't understand how you'd feel about it. I tell you the mere presence of that chap in the room unsettles people. He's a disturbing influence. Even strangers notice it. Suppose he was over here, and me away in the Mediterranean? You've no idea how he can talk and wheedle and explain everything to suit his own ends. I do."

I did not say so, but I understood Mr. Carville's feelings. Cecil's letters bore him out very completely.

"There's another thing you may not appreciate. When you're married you will, no doubt. A man and his wife aren't always on the same dead level terms with each other. Little differences, lasting perhaps an hour or a minute, sometimes till breakfast, crop up. Even in a case like mine, here to-day and gone to-morrow, we can get on each other's nerves. There's friction in every machine ... unavoidable. You understand me, sir?"

"Yes," I said. "As well as a bachelor can, I think I appreciate your point. You mean that since you can't foresee these minor affairs and since you may leave home before the clouds roll by...."

"That's just it! Imagine a man like Frank living next door say, a man who has known Rosa, as I told you ... See?"

As we stepped upon the ferry I noticed that his features were sharp and bore the impress of a quite unusual secret care, I felt guiltily that we had been unwise to tell so much to the painter-cousin. Who could tell what it might not lead to, even after so long an interval, with so incalculable a man as this brother?

With the bellow of the whistle Mr. Carville's face cleared and assumed its wonted placidity. The deck trembled as the screw began to revolve, and imperceptibly we moved out towards Governor's Island. It was just here, I think, as we began our little six-mile journey to St. George, that a sudden illumination came to me. I understood Mr. Carville's reason for waiting instead of explaining his impression of New York. He gave me credit, apparently, for the ability to find it out for myself.

The vessel was going swiftly now over the shining waters of New York Bay. To the left lay the low and sombre buildings of Governor's Island; to the right the prison-like pile of Ellis Island showed red in the sunlight. On either side the shores fell away from us, leaving Bartholdi's statue, for a brief moment, the dominant note in the scene. Quickly we hurried by, and Black Tom, with his fringe of cranes and stacks, his dark panoply of low-lying smoke, was revealed. Before us uprose the wooded heights of Staten Island, and far down the Narrows a glimpse of the blue Atlantic. A couple of tramp steamers, one with much red paint on her bows, were coming up past us, and I noticed the Red Ensign was flying from the poop. With large gestures Mr. Carville's arm swept the horizon, indicating the salient points. Almost before I was aware of it we were entering the ferry station and he was calling my attention to the chimneys and buildings on the Communipaw shore.

"Now," said he, as we emerged upon the street, "your road lies down the coast, but if you have an hour to spare, you might come over and look at the ship. We'll take the trolley to New Brighton and ferry across from there. But of course——"

"With pleasure," I said hastily. It occurred to me that I could do worse than visit Mr. Carville's ship. We boarded a trolley-car.

"You see," said Mr. Carville, "I'm interested in Staten Island. In a way it's very English. About a year ago I bought a lot up at Richmond Bridge. The house will be ready in the spring and we'll move in. I've had a fancy for a long while to have a home of my own. We did think of buying in your part, but it's rather a long way for me, besides being dear."

"You'll be leaving Van Diemen's Avenue?" I said. He nodded.

"Sure. The wife's not very anxious to stay out there. She's funny in some ways. Thinks there's a prejudice against her."

"I assure you——" I began.

"Oh, I don't mean you, sir. She means in the stores. She's heard things.... Women are quick to take offence. She has her own way of living and it's a good way. We shouldn't like to feel we weren't wanted. And you know, in your parts, there's a good deal of gentility creeping in. I was reading the local paper last night.... Mrs. This and Mrs. That entertaining to bridge, and so on! Humph!"

The car jingled and swayed round the corners, keeping close to the shore, and pulled up with a jerk at New Brighton. Across the narrow belt of water I could see the sterns of many ships.

"Here we are," said Mr. Carville. "The launch starts down there."

A stiff breeze was blowing and we were occupied with our hats until we reached the Communipaw side. Mr. Carville muttered a warning about no smoking "... five hundred dollars fine ... necessary, you see," and I saw his corn-cob no more until we reached his room.

"There she is," he remarked, indicating two very red funnels projecting above a roof. "That's the Raritan."

A faint smell of petroleum was in the air as we threaded our way among the blue-ended barrels and lengths of oily hose. In one way this ship of Mr. Carville's was novel to me. There was about her decks no noise of cranes lifting cargo, no open hatchways, no whiffs of steam or screaming of pulley-blocks, with huge bales of merchandise swinging in mid-air. As we ascended the accommodation ladder I saw nothing save a young man with thick gauntlets standing guard over an iron wheel valve in a big pipe that ran along the deck. A stout, iron-grey man in uniform was leaning against the sky-light on the poop-deck as we came past the funnels. With a slight bashfulness Mr. Carville turned, and making a vague introductory gesture, pronounced our names. I caught the words "Chief Officer" and "come to have a look round!" There was a little further parley, in which the "Old Man," "stores," and "The Second" bore some part. I did not pay much attention to the conversation, to tell the truth. I was looking northward across New York Bay and comprehending the significance of Mr. Carville's parallel between Manhattan and the City of the Lagoons. For a moment I forgot that I was standing on the deck of a ship. From my lacustrine vantage the whole of the wide harbour lay in view, the more distant edge of Long Island forming an irregular and dusky line betwixt the blue waters and the bluer sky. In the middle distance stood the statue of Liberty, islanded in the incoming tide-way, while away beyond, rising in superb splendour from a pearly haze, the innumerable towers of Manhattan floated and gleamed before my eyes. Irresistibly there came to me a memory of Turner's Venetian masterpieces, and I knew that even that great magician would have seized upon the scene before me with avidity, would have delighted in the fairy-like threads of the bridges, the poetic groupings of the vast buildings, and the innumerable fenestrations of the campanili. One by one half-forgotten fragments of Byron came back to me as I looked out across the wide lagoon. I thought of Venice "throned on her hundred Isles," of him who said,

"I loved her from my boyhood; she to me Was as a fairy city of the heart, Rising like water-columns from the sea, Of joy the sojourn and of wealth the mart."

One by one, moreover, there came before me still more convincing evidence that this casual analogy had in it a deeper significance, that here the Queen of the Adriatic was indeed resuscitated and the Venetian Republic born to a sublimer destiny. Surely the same indomitable spirit, the same high courage, that had reared that wondrous city out of the sea, was here before me, piling story upon story, pinnacle beyond pinnacle, till our old-world hearts sickened and our unaccustomed brains grew dizzy at the sight.

For a time—I know not how long—I stood with my hand on the rail, looking out upon that vision from the Kills. I heard Mr. Carville's voice behind me, and I turned.

"What do you think, sir?" he said, and waved his hand.

"You are right," I replied in a low tone. "You are certainly right. As for your San Giorgio," I smiled, "I'm afraid, Mr. Carville, you are a cleverer man than I thought you!"

"Come down and have a smoke," he said. "I've some letters to see to."

We descended the companion-way and crossed a large cabin with berths all round. Mr. Carville selected a Yale key from his bunch and opened his door. A young man in a soiled serge suit came out of the next room with some letters.

"Ah!" said Mr. Carville, hanging up his Derby hat. "How's things, mister?" and he took the letters.

The young man addressed as mister made several incoherent remarks of a technical nature, and with a glance in my direction withdrew.

"Sit down," said Mr. Carville, shutting the door. "You'll excuse me for a minute?"

I sat down on a red plush settee while my host settled into a wicker easy chair by a small desk. The room by our computation would be small, yet I perceived that Mr. Carville had within reach of his hand almost every convenience of civilization. At his elbow were a telephone and a speaking tube; just above him an electric fan. Electric lights were placed all over the room. His bed lay below the port-holes and a wash-basin of polished mahogany was folded up beside the bed. On the table were cigars and whisky. And between the bed and the wardrobe, on four shelves, were ranged some two hundred volumes; even for a landsman a respectable library.

He sat for some moments reading his letters with patient attention, pinching his lower lip between thumb and finger. My estimate of him had undergone several changes since leaving the Battery; since leaving deck, even. I felt somehow that this quiet, sedate person was no longer apologetic in his attitude towards me. Here he was master, and a subtle alteration of his demeanour indicated this to me. He sat there, as I watched him, solid and secure by inalienable right of succession, a son of that stern, imaginative adventurer, his father; a son, moreover, of that sea which he served from year to year. I looked up at the photograph of his wife which he had mentioned, a photograph set in silver. The soft shadows of the platinotype suited Mrs. Carville. Evidently this had been taken about the time of her marriage; the fine modelling of her face and the poise of her head were instinct with youth. In her eyes I fancied something of the mild expression with which she accompanied her remark, "He is a good man." On either side of the silver frame were small pictures of the boys.