He lifted his glass and drank it off, then thrust it out to be refilled.  “Life as the world lives it—­bah!” he dismissed it with the scorn of one who counts himself divested of all illusions.  “Life would be an infernal bore if it were not for its paradoxes.  Now you, Captain Barnaby, would never dream that in becoming dead to the world—­in other people’s belief—­I have become intensely alive.  There are opened up infinite possibilities—­”

He drank again and eyed me darkly, and then went on in his crack-brained way.  “What is life but a challenge to pretense, a constant exercise in duplicity, with so few that come to master it as an art?  Every one goes about with something locked deep in his heart.  Take yourself, Captain Barnaby.  You have your secrets—­hidden from me, from all the world—­which, if they could be dragged out of you—­”

His deep-set eyes bored through the darkness upon me.  Hunched up in the deck chair, with his legs crossed under him, he was like an animated Buddha venting a dark philosophy and seeking to undermine my mental balance with his sophistry.

“I’m a plain man of the sea,” I rejoined, bluntly.  “I take life as it comes.”

He smiled derisively, drained his glass, and held it out again.  “But you have your secrets, rather clumsily guarded, to be sure—­”

“What secrets?” I cried out, goaded almost beyond endurance.

He seemed to deprecate the vigour of my retort and lifted a cautioning hand.  “Do you want every one on board to hear this conversation?” At that moment the smoke-wrapped cone of Lakalatcha was cleft by a sheet of flame, and we confronted each other in a sort of blood-red dawn.

“There is no reason why we should quarrel,” he went on, after darkness had enveloped us again.  “But there are times which call for plain speaking.  Major Stanleigh is probably hardly aware of just what he said to me under a little artful questioning.  It seems that a lady who—­shall we say, whom we both have the honour of knowing? —­is in love.  Love, mark you.  It is always interesting to see that flower bud twice from the same stalk.  However, one naturally defers to a lady, especially when one is very much in her way. Place aux dames, eh?  Exit poor Farquharson!  You must admit that his was an altruistic soul.  Well, she has her freedom—­if only to barter it for a new bondage.  Shall we drink to the happy future of that romance?”

He lifted to me his glass with ironical invitation, while I sat aghast and speechless, my heart pounding against my ribs.  This intolerable colloquy could not last forever.  I deliberated what I should do if we were surprised.  At the sound of a footfall or the soft creak of a plank I felt that I might lose all control and leap up and brain him with the heavy bottle in my grasp.  I had an insane desire to spring at his throat and throttle his infamous bravado, tumble him overboard and annihilate the last vestige of his existence.