“I’ve waited long for you to tell me even that.  Won’t you tell me more, sir?”

“Enough for now.  But whatever my uncle thought or wished, here, Guy, is an estate to your hand to enjoy.  What d’y’ say, eh, to the life of a Southern gentleman on his plantation?  A hundred thousand acres, a thousand slaves, a stable of the horses you love so, upland and river bottom to hunt, dancing, riding, balls, the city in winter.  Is not that something better than the hard, uncertain sea, Guy?”

He had paused for my answer, but I made none.  He was standing motionless, except for the backward toss of his head and the deep inhalation, three or four times, of the briny air from the flooding river.  There was disappointment in his voice when he took up the talk again.

“Oh, Guy, between us two what a difference!  I was born ashore, you at sea, and yet

  “’It’s you for the back of a charging barb,
  And me for the deck of a heaving brig!’”

In a lower voice he repeated the couplet, and was plainly vastly pleased with it.  “Faith, and I wonder is that my own, or something I read somewhere.  Something of the lilt of a Scotch strathspey to ’t, shouldn’t you say?  You know more of such things.  What d’y’ say—­shall I claim that for my own, Guy?”

“You do, sir, and it’s not Homer, nor Dante, nor Keats who will rise up to accuse you of plagiarism.”

“Bah!  You would no more allow me the merit of a poetic vein than—­”

“Poetry, sir?”

“Poetry—­why not?” and suddenly bending sidewise and forward, he essayed to obtain a fuller view of my face.  And it is true that I was thinking of anything but poetry.

His face darkened as he gazed.  “A hundred estates and plantations were nothing to me against—­” he burst out passionately, but no further than that.  He checked himself and went inside, and with no good-night going.

In the morning he was gone.  I waited—­one, two, three days, and then I went also—­to Savannah, where I saw the Bess, but so altered that it needed a lifetime’s intimacy to hail her in the stream.  Her spars had been sent down and her name was now the Triton, and to her bow and stern was clamped the false work which left her with no more outward grace than any clumsy coaster; and by these signs I knew that Mr. Villard of Villard Manor would once more disappear and that Captain Blaise would soon again be sailing the Dancing Bess overseas.

Captain Blaise had not yet come aboard; but whatever ship he sailed the full run of that ship was mine, and I went into his cabin to wait for him.

It was after dark when he came over the side.  It was always after dark when he boarded the Bess in home ports.  His words were colder than his expression when he addressed me.  “And where are you bound?”

“I don’t know yet, sir.”

“And why not?”

“You have not yet told me, sir, where you are going.”