I traversed the dining-room slowly.  I thought:  She’s listening to my footsteps; she can’t help it; she’ll hear me open and shut that door.  And I closed it as gently behind me as if I had been a thief retreating with his ill-gotten booty.  During that stealthy act I experienced the last touch of emotion in that house, at the thought of the girl I had left sitting there in the obscurity, with her heavy hair and empty eyes as black as the night itself, staring into the walled garden, silent, warm, odorous with the perfume of imprisoned flowers, which, like herself, were lost to sight in a world buried in darkness.

The narrow, ill-lighted, rustic streets I knew so well on my way to the harbour were extremely quiet.  I felt in my heart that the further one ventures the better one understands how everything in our life is common, short, and empty; that it is in seeking the unknown in our sensations that we discover how mediocre are our attempts and how soon defeated!  Jacobus’s boatman was waiting at the steps with an unusual air of readiness.  He put me alongside the ship, but did not give me his confidential “Good-evening, sah,” and, instead of shoving off at once, remained holding by the ladder.

I was a thousand miles from commercial affairs, when on the dark quarter-deck Mr. Burns positively rushed at me, stammering with excitement.  He had been pacing the deck distractedly for hours awaiting my arrival.  Just before sunset a lighter loaded with potatoes had come alongside with that fat ship-chandler himself sitting on the pile of sacks.  He was now stuck immovable in the cabin.  What was the meaning of it all?  Surely I did not—­

“Yes, Mr. Burns, I did,” I cut him short.  He was beginning to make gestures of despair when I stopped that, too, by giving him the key of my desk and desiring him, in a tone which admitted of no argument, to go below at once, pay Mr. Jacobus’s bill, and send him out of the ship.

“I don’t want to see him,” I confessed frankly, climbing the poop-ladder.  I felt extremely tired.  Dropping on the seat of the skylight, I gave myself up to idle gazing at the lights about the quay and at the black mass of the mountain on the south side of the harbour.  I never heard Jacobus leave the ship with every single sovereign of my ready cash in his pocket.  I never heard anything till, a long time afterwards, Mr. Burns, unable to contain himself any longer, intruded upon me with his ridiculously angry lamentations at my weakness and good nature.

“Of course, there’s plenty of room in the after-hatch.  But they are sure to go rotten down there.  Well!  I never heard . . . seventeen tons!  I suppose I must hoist in that lot first thing to-morrow morning.”

“I suppose you must.  Unless you drop them overboard.  But I’m afraid you can’t do that.  I wouldn’t mind myself, but it’s forbidden to throw rubbish into the harbour, you know.”