That evening I experienced more distinctly than ever the sense of moral discomfort which always attended me in that house lying under the ban of all “decent” people.  I refused to stay on and smoke after dinner; and when I put my hand into the thickly-cushioned palm of Jacobus, I said to myself that it would be for the last time under his roof.  I pressed his bulky paw heartily nevertheless.  Hadn’t he got me out of a serious difficulty?  To the few words of acknowledgment I was bound, and indeed quite willing, to utter, he answered by stretching his closed lips in his melancholy, glued-together smile.

“That will be all right, I hope, Captain,” he breathed out weightily.

“What do you mean?” I asked, alarmed.  “That your brother might yet—­”

“Oh, no,” he reassured me.  “He . . . he’s a man of his word, Captain.”

My self-communion as I walked away from his door, trying to believe that this was for the last time, was not satisfactory.  I was aware myself that I was not sincere in my reflections as to Jacobus’s motives, and, of course, the very next day I went back again.

How weak, irrational, and absurd we are!  How easily carried away whenever our awakened imagination brings us the irritating hint of a desire!  I cared for the girl in a particular way, seduced by the moody expression of her face, by her obstinate silences, her rare, scornful words; by the perpetual pout of her closed lips, the black depths of her fixed gaze turned slowly upon me as if in contemptuous provocation, only to be averted next moment with an exasperating indifference.

Of course the news of my assiduity had spread all over the little town.  I noticed a change in the manner of my acquaintances and even something different in the nods of the other captains, when meeting them at the landing-steps or in the offices where business called me.  The old-maidish head clerk treated me with distant punctiliousness and, as it were, gathered his skirts round him for fear of contamination.  It seemed to me that the very niggers on the quays turned to look after me as I passed; and as to Jacobus’s boatman his “Good-night, sah!” when he put me on board was no longer merely cordial—­it had a familiar, confidential sound as though we had been partners in some villainy.

My friend S- the elder passed me on the other side of the street with a wave of the hand and an ironic smile.  The younger brother, the one they had married to an elderly shrew, he, on the strength of an older friendship and as if paying a debt of gratitude, took the liberty to utter a word of warning.

“You’re doing yourself no good by your choice of friends, my dear chap,” he said with infantile gravity.

As I knew that the meeting of the brothers Jacobus was the subject of excited comment in the whole of the sugary Pearl of the Ocean I wanted to know why I was blamed.

“I have been the occasion of a move which may end in a reconciliation surely desirable from the point of view of the proprieties—­don’t you know?”