The Medea and the Cygnet, and the other ships I knew which carried those whose fortunes were some concern of mine, might have sailed over the edge of the world.  My only communication was with an occasional familiar name in the reports of the Shipping List.  Then Macandrew came home again.  But it was difficult to meet him.  Mrs. Macandrew told me he was working by his ship in drydock.  They had had trouble with the engines that voyage, and she herself had seen little of him, except to find him, when she came down of a morning, asleep in the drawing-room.  Just flung himself down in the first place, you know.  In those greasy overalls, too.  He had told her the engine-room looked like a scrap-heap, but the ship had to be ready for sea in ten days.  Once he had worked thirty-two hours on end.  Think of that, and he had not been home for six months.  She would strongly advise any girl not to marry a man who went to sea, and if I met Macandrew I was to bring him home at once.  Did I hear?

When I found the Medea it was late in the day, for she was not in the dry-dock that had been named.  Her Chief had just gone ashore.  There was a chance that he would have called at the Negro Boy, but he had not been seen there.  Except for the landlord, who was at a table talking to a stranger, the saloon was empty.  A silk hat was on the table before the stranger, beside a tankard, and the hat was surmounted by a pair of neatly folded kid gloves.  “Come over here,” said the landlord.  “Sit here for a bit, Macandrew may come in.  This is Dr. Maslin.”  A monocle fell its length of black cord from the doctor’s eye, and he nodded to me.

“The doctor used to be with me when I was running out East,” explained the landlord.  “Where did you say you had come from now, Doctor?  Oh, yes, Tabacol.  Funny name.  I was never on the South American coast.  After I left you sick at Macassar, the last trip we had together—­the old Siwalik—­I left the sea to younger men.  But there you are, Doctor.  Still at it.  Why don’t you give it up?”

The doctor did not answer, except to make a bubbling noise in his tankard.  He placed it on the table again delicately and deliberately, and wiped his grizzled moustache with a crimson silk handkerchief.  He put up his monocle, and seemed to be intently inspecting a gas globe over the counter.  I thought his grimace in this concentration came from an effort to reinforce his will against all curiosity on our part.  But it appeared he was really looking at what showed, at an angle, of a portrait on the wall of an inner room.  He could just see it, from where he sat.  Anyhow, the landlord imagined it was the portrait which had caught his friend’s interest.  “Looking at that crayon portrait, Doctor?  Ah, showy woman, isn’t she?  Used to be barmaid here.  The Lord knows where she is now.  Went to sea, like a fool.  Stewardess, or something worse.  Much more useful here.”