“Ah, father,” he said cheerfully.  “Picking up a bit, eh?  That’s good.  Ugly accident, that.”

“Yes,” replied the Captain, looking up into his face.  “Block split, I suppose?”

“Yes,” said the mate.  “That’s it.  How do you feel?”

“You didn’t notice the block, I suppose, when you put the new pins in?” asked the Captain.

“Can’t say I did,” answered the mate, “or I’d have changed it.  You’re not going to blame me surely, father?”

The Captain smiled.  “No, Arthur, I’m not going to blame you,” he said.  “I want to hear how you brought off that barque’s crew.  Is it a good yarn for Minnie?”

At Barcelona the Captain went to hospital and they took off his right arm at the shoulder.  The Burdock went back without him, and he lay in his bed wondering how it was that the loss of an arm should make a man feel lonely.

He was quickly about again.  His body was clean from the bone out, clean and hard, and he had never been ill.  When the time came to take a walk, he arrayed himself in shore-going black.  It cost him an infinity of trouble and more than an hour of the morning to dress himself with one hand, but he would not have help.  Then it was that he discovered a strange thing; it was his right arm, the arm that was gone, that hindered him.  The scars of the amputation had healed, but unless he bore the fact deliberately in mind, he felt the arm to be there.  He tried to button his braces with it, to knot his tie, to lace his boots, and had to overtake the impulse and correct it with an effort.  When his clothes were on, he put his right hand in his trousers pocket, then remembered that it was not there, and withdrew hastily the hand he had not got.  During the walk the same trouble remained with him; it muddled him when he bought tobacco and tried to pick up the change.  Before he slept that night, he dropped on his knees at his bedside, and folded the left hand of flesh against the right hand of dreamstuff in prayer.

When his time came to go home in the Burdock, he was an altered man.  The quiet, all-observant scrutiny had gone, and the officers who greeted him as he came up the accommodation ladder saw it at once.  Arthur Price was now in command, a breezy, good-looking captain in blue serge and gold braid.

“You’ve got her, then, Arthur?” said the old man, as he reached the deck and stood looking about him.

“Yes, I’ve got her,” answered his son.  “That your kit, father?  Sewell (to the chief mate), send a couple of hands to get that dunnage aboard.  Come along below, father.”

He tucked his arm into his father’s and led him down.  Mildly taking stock of the well-remembered surroundings, the old man noticed he was being taken to the Captain’s state-room, and an impulse of gratitude moved him.  But he was glad he did not speak of it when his son put aside the curtains at the door for him, and he saw that this was not to be his room.  New chintzes took the place of his old leather cushions; a big photograph of Minnie stood on the lid of the chronometer case, and the broken-backed Admiralty guides, ocean directories and the rest were reinforced by a brigade of smartly bound novels.