“Poor fellow!” I murmured.

“Yes.  Poor fellow,” he repeated, musingly.  “That brute wouldn’t let him—­not even him—­cheat her of her prey.  But he made her fast in dock next morning.  He did.  We hadn’t exchanged a word—­not a single look for that matter.  I didn’t want to look at him.  When the last rope was fast he put his hands to his head and stood gazing down at his feet as if trying to remember something.  The men waited on the main deck for the words that end the voyage.  Perhaps that is what he was trying to remember.  I spoke for him.  ‘That’ll do, men.’

“I never saw a crew leave a ship so quietly.  They sneaked over the rail one after another, taking care not to bang their sea chests too heavily.  They looked our way, but not one had the stomach to come up and offer to shake hands with the mate as is usual.

“I followed him all over the empty ship to and fro, here and there, with no living soul about but the two of us, because the old ship-keeper had locked himself up in the galley—­both doors.  Suddenly poor Charley mutters, in a crazy voice:  ‘I’m done here,’ and strides down the gangway with me at his heels, up the dock, out at the gate, on towards Tower Hill.  He used to take rooms with a decent old landlady in America Square, to be near his work.

“All at once he stops short, turns round, and comes back straight at me.  ‘Ned,’ says he, I am going home.’  I had the good luck to sight a four-wheeler and got him in just in time.  His legs were beginning to give way.  In our hall he fell down on a chair, and I’ll never forget father’s and mother’s amazed, perfectly still faces as they stood over him.  They couldn’t understand what had happened to him till I blubbered out, ‘Maggie got drowned, yesterday, in the river.’

“Mother let out a little cry.  Father looks from him to me, and from me to him, as if comparing our faces—­for, upon my soul, Charley did not resemble himself at all.  Nobody moved; and the poor fellow raises his big brown hands slowly to his throat, and with one single tug rips everything open—­collar, shirt, waistcoat—­a perfect wreck and ruin of a man.  Father and I got him upstairs somehow, and mother pretty nearly killed herself nursing him through a brain fever.”

The man in tweeds nodded at me significantly.

“Ah! there was nothing that could be done with that brute.  She had a devil in her.”

“Where’s your brother?” I asked, expecting to hear he was dead.  But he was commanding a smart steamer on the China coast, and never came home now.

Jermyn fetched a heavy sigh, and the handkerchief being now sufficiently dry, put it up tenderly to his red and lamentable nose.