Casey made no pretence to love England.  Gilbart never quite knew why he tolerated him.  But so it was:  they had met in the reading-room of a Sailors’ Home, and had somehow struck up an acquaintance, even a sort of unacknowledged friendship.  Their common love of books may have helped; for Casey—­Heaven knew where or how—­had picked up an education far above Gilbart’s, and amazing in a common stoker.  Also he wore some baffling, attractive mystery behind his reserve.  Once or twice—­ certainly not half a dozen times—­he had at a casual word pulled open for an instant the doors of his heart and given Gilbart a sensation of looking into a furnace, into white-hot depths, sudden and frightening.  But what chiefly won him was the knowledge that in some perverse, involuntary and quite inexplicable way he was liked by this sullen fellow, who had no other friend and sought none.  He knew the liking to be there as surely as he knew it to be shy and sullen, curt in expression, contemptuous of itself.  Had he ever troubled to examine himself honestly, Gilbart must have acknowledged himself Casey’s inferior in all but amiability; and Casey no doubt knew this.  But in friendship as in love there is usually one who likes and one who suffers himself to be liked, and the positions are not allotted by merit.  Gilbart—­a self-deceiver all his life—­had accepted the compliment complacently enough.

The Berenice cleared the crowd and quickened her speed as the five-minute gun puffed out from the committee-ship and the Blue Peter ran up the halyards in the smoke.  Gilbart turned his attention upon the two big yachts and followed their movements until the starting-gun was fired; saw them haul up and plunge over the line so close together that the crews might have shaken hands; watched them as they fluttered out their spinnakers for the run to the eastern mark, for all the world like two great white moths floating side by side swiftly but with no show of hurry.  When he returned to the cruiser she was far away, almost off the western end of the breakwater—­gone, so far as he was concerned and whoever else might be watching her from the shore; the parting over, the threads torn and snapped, her crew face to face now with the long voyage.

He drew a long breath, and was aware for the first time of a woman standing about twenty yards on his left behind a group of chattering holiday-makers.  He saw at a glance that she did not belong to them, but was gazing after the Berenice; a forlorn, tearless figure, with a handkerchief crumpled up into a ball in her hand.  Affability was a part of Gilbart’s profession, and besides, he hated to see a woman suffer.  He edged toward her and lifted his hat.

“I hope,” said he, “these persons are not annoying you?  They don’t understand, of course.  I, too, have a friend on the Berenice.”

The woman looked at him as though she heard but could not for the moment grasp what he said.  She tightened her grip on the handkerchief and kept her lips firmly compressed.