How long had he been there looking at me, appraising me in my unguarded day-dreaming state?  I would have been more disconcerted if, having the clock set in the top of the mirror-frame right in front of me, I had not noticed that its long hand had hardly moved at all.

I could not have been in that cabin more than two minutes altogether.  Say three. . . .  So he could not have been watching me more than a mere fraction of a minute, luckily.  Still, I regretted the occurrence.

But I showed nothing of it as I rose leisurely (it had to be leisurely) and greeted him with perfect friendliness.

There was something reluctant and at the same time attentive in his bearing.  His name was Burns.  We left the cabin and went round the ship together.  His face in the full light of day appeared very pale, meagre, even haggard.  Somehow I had a delicacy as to looking too often at him; his eyes, on the contrary, remained fairly glued on my face.  They were greenish and had an expectant expression.

He answered all my questions readily enough, but my ear seemed to catch a tone of unwillingness.  The second officer, with three or four hands, was busy forward.  The mate mentioned his name and I nodded to him in passing.  He was very young.  He struck me as rather a cub.

When we returned below, I sat down on one end of a deep, semi-circular, or, rather, semi-oval settee, upholstered in red plush.  It extended right across the whole after-end of the cabin.  Mr. Burns motioned to sit down, dropped into one of the swivel-chairs round the table, and kept his eyes on me as persistently as ever, and with that strange air as if all this were make-believe and he expected me to get up, burst into a laugh, slap him on the back, and vanish from the cabin.

There was an odd stress in the situation which began to make me uncomfortable.  I tried to react against this vague feeling.

“It’s only my inexperience,” I thought.

In the face of that man, several years, I judged, older than myself, I became aware of what I had left already behind me—­my youth.  And that was indeed poor comfort.  Youth is a fine thing, a mighty power—­as long as one does not think of it.  I felt I was becoming self-conscious.  Almost against my will I assumed a moody gravity.  I said:  “I see you have kept her in very good order, Mr. Burns.”

Directly I had uttered these words I asked myself angrily why the deuce did I want to say that?  Mr. Burns in answer had only blinked at me.  What on earth did he mean?

I fell back on a question which had been in my thoughts for a long time—­the most natural question on the lips of any seaman whatever joining a ship.  I voiced it (confound this self-consciousness) in a degaged cheerful tone:  “I suppose she can travel—­what?”

Now a question like this might have been answered normally, either in accents of apologetic sorrow or with a visibly suppressed pride, in a “I don’t want to boast, but you shall see,” sort of tone.  There are sailors, too, who would have been roughly outspoken:  “Lazy brute,” or openly delighted:  “She’s a flyer.”  Two ways, if four manners.