‘’Tis the thing the docthor orthered,’ said Ryan, with timorous humour, fearing an ungenerous response.

It was Jim’s first impulse to refuse the offer with out compliments, but at that moment the greasy ship’s lantern swinging above them on a rope’s end illumined the Irishman’s face, and Done saw his mark upon it—­a long purple wheal under the left eye, a week old yesterday, but still conspicuous.  For a reason he could not have explained even to himself, that changed the young man’s mind.  He drank the liquor, and returned the pannikin with a ‘Thank you!’ not over-cordial.

‘Yer a proper man, Done,’ said Ryan, ‘an’ I’m proud I fought wid ye, an’ mighty glad ye bate me.  Good-night!’

‘Good-night,’ answered Done coldly.  He had been too long at variance with men to take kindly to popularity now.

II

Next morning Done lingered below till the day was well advanced, but the darkness and the heavy atmosphere ’tween decks drove him into the open.  It was a fair day, a big placid sun was shining, and the breeze followed them with a crisp suggestion of glittering ice-fields far down in the south.  The sailors and passengers were grouped in small parties of six or seven, lounging about the deck in lazy abandonment, leaning over the side, smoking comfortably, and spitting with a certain dreamy satisfaction into the sweet, clean sea, or sitting in rings on improvised seats, alert, and loud in argument.

Jim’s youthful face was even more than usually forbidding that morning as he stepped amongst the men to his favourite position on one of the guns.  He feared an attempt to break through his reserve, some demonstration arising out of last night’s adventure, that might be taken advantage of by the men to force their society and friendship upon him.  He looked at none of the faces turned curiously in his direction, and his expression of stubborn enmity killed the cheer that sprang from a few of the forecastle passengers, and it tailed into a feeble absurdity.  Leaning upon the old wooden gun-carriage, with his arms supporting his chin; he stared at the cleavage of the green sea and the swelling foam, feeling at his back all the time the cackle of criticism, like an irritation of the spinal marrow, chafing fretfully at this further proof of the failure of his long endeavour to school himself into complete indifference.

Absolute serenity in the teeth of public opinion—­good, bad, or indifferent—­that was an ideal frame of mind, to the attainment of which he had set himself when still a mere boy; but men and women remained powerful to hurt and to auger him.  He had acquired from his long moral exercise a certain power of restraint up to the point at which his fierce temper blazed; he reached the stage of ignition without those displays of sparks and smoke that are usual preliminaries to a ‘flare-up.’  He had learned, too, in the course of his schooling, to simulate an imposing unconcern under commonplace trials and tribulations, when it so pleased him, and between the satisfaction to be felt in being able successfully to assume a given virtue and in having actual possession of that virtue the distinction is too delicate for unregenerate minds.