“Dud ye send word tull the wife?” had been his greeting to the clerk.

“Yes, a telegram, as soon as you were reported.”

“She’ll likely be comin’ down on the marnin’ train,” the skipper had soliloquized, and gone inside to change his clothes and wash.

He took a last glance about the room and at two photographs on the wall, one of the wife the other of an infant—­the child he had never seen.  He stepped out into the cabin, with its panelled walls of cedar and maple, and with its long table that seated ten, and at which he had eaten by himself through all the weary time.  No laughter and clatter and wordy argument of the mess-room had been his.  He had eaten silently, almost morosely, his silence emulated by the noiseless Asiatic who had served him.  It came to him suddenly, the overwhelming realization of the loneliness of those two years and more.  All his vexations and anxieties had been his own.  He had shared them with no one.  His two young officers were too young and flighty, the mate too stupid.  There was no consulting with them.  One tenant had shared the cabin with him, that tenant his responsibility.  They had dined and supped together, walked the bridge together, and together they had bedded.

“Och!” he muttered to that grim companion, “I’m quit of you, an’ wull quit . . . for a wee.”

Ashore he passed the last of the seamen with their bags, and, at the agent’s, with the usual delays, put through his ship business.  When asked out by them to drink he took milk and soda.

“I am no teetotaler,” he explained; “but for the life o’ me I canna bide beer or whusky.”

In the early afternoon, when he finished paying off his crew, he hurried to the private office where he had been told his wife was waiting.

His eyes were for her first, though the temptation was great to have more than a hurried glimpse of the child in the chair beside her.  He held her off from him after the long embrace, and looked into her face long and steadily, drinking in every feature of it and wondering that he could mark no changes of time.  A warm man, his wife thought him, though had the opinion of his officers been asked it would have been:  a harsh man and a bitter one.

“Wull, Annie, how is ut wi’ ye?” he queried, and drew her to him again.

And again he held her away from him, this wife of ten years and of whom he knew so little.  She was almost a stranger—­more a stranger than his Chinese steward, and certainly far more a stranger than his own officers whom he had seen every day, day and day, for eight hundred and fifty days.  Married ten years, and in that time he had been with her nine weeks—­scarcely a honeymoon.  Each time home had been a getting acquainted again with her.  It was the fate of the men who went out to the salt-ploughing.  Little they knew of their wives and less of their children.  There was his chief engineer—­ old, near-sighted MacPherson—­who told the story of returning home to be locked out of his house by his four-year kiddie that never had laid eyes on him before.