“Yes, yes!” I replied eagerly; but he remained calm.  He looked more tired than I had ever seen him before.

“Well, Captain, you may go and tell your people that they can get that lot from my brother.”

As I remained open-mouthed at this, he added his usual placid formula of assurance: 

“You’ll find it correct, Captain.”

“You spoke to your brother about it?” I was distinctly awed.  “And for me?  Because he must have known that my ship’s the only one hung up for bags.  How on earth—­”

He wiped his brow again.  I noticed that he was dressed with unusual care, in clothes in which I had never seen him before.  He avoided my eye.

“You’ve heard people talk, of course. . . .  That’s true enough.  He . . .  I . . .  We certainly. . . for several years . . .”  His voice declined to a mere sleepy murmur.  “You see I had something to tell him of, something which—­”

His murmur stopped.  He was not going to tell me what this something was.  And I didn’t care.  Anxious to carry the news to my charterers, I ran back on the verandah to get my hat.

At the bustle I made the girl turned her eyes slowly in my direction, and even the old woman was checked in her knitting.  I stopped a moment to exclaim excitedly: 

“Your father’s a brick, Miss Don’t Care.  That’s what he is.”

She beheld my elation in scornful surprise.  Jacobus with unwonted familiarity seized my arm as I flew through the dining-room, and breathed heavily at me a proposal about “A plate of soup” that evening.  I answered distractedly:  “Eh?  What?  Oh, thanks!  Certainly.  With pleasure,” and tore myself away.  Dine with him?  Of course.  The merest gratitude

But some three hours afterwards, in the dusky, silent street, paved with cobble-stones, I became aware that it was not mere gratitude which was guiding my steps towards the house with the old garden, where for years no guest other than myself had ever dined.  Mere gratitude does not gnaw at one’s interior economy in that particular way.  Hunger might; but I was not feeling particularly hungry for Jacobus’s food.

On that occasion, too, the girl refused to come to the table.

My exasperation grew.  The old woman cast malicious glances at me.  I said suddenly to Jacobus:  “Here!  Put some chicken and salad on that plate.”  He obeyed without raising his eyes.  I carried it with a knife and fork and a serviette out on the verandah.  The garden was one mass of gloom, like a cemetery of flowers buried in the darkness, and she, in the chair, seemed to muse mournfully over the extinction of light and colour.  Only whiffs of heavy scent passed like wandering, fragrant souls of that departed multitude of blossoms.  I talked volubly, jocularly, persuasively, tenderly; I talked in a subdued tone.  To a listener it would have sounded like the murmur of a pleading lover.  Whenever I paused expectantly there was only a deep silence.  It was like offering food to a seated statue.