“It’s only for a couple of days,” I said, intending to cheer him up.

“Perhaps you would like to pay in advance?” he suggested eagerly.

“Certainly not!” I burst out directly I could speak.  “Never heard of such a thing!  This is the most infernal cheek. . . .”

He had seized his head in both hands—­a gesture of despair which checked my indignation.

“Oh, dear!  Oh, dear!  Don’t fly out like this.  I am asking everybody.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said bluntly.

“Well, I am going to.  And if you gentlemen all agreed to pay in advance I could make Hamilton pay up, too.  He’s always turning up ashore dead broke, and even when he has some money he won’t settle his bills.  I don’t know what to do with him.  He swears at me and tells me I can’t chuck a white man out into the street here.  So if you only would. . . .”

I was amazed.  Incredulous, too.  I suspected the fellow of gratuitous impertinence.  I told him with marked emphasis that I would see him and Hamilton hanged first, and requested him to conduct me to my room with no more of his nonsense.  He produced then a key from somewhere and led the way out of his lair, giving me a vicious sidelong look in passing.

“Any one I know staying here?” I asked him before he left my room.

He had recovered his usual pained impatient tone, and said that Captain Giles was there, back from a Solo Sea trip.  Two other guests were staying also.  He paused.  And, of course, Hamilton, he added.

“Oh, yes!  Hamilton,” I said, and the miserable creature took himself off with a final groan.

His impudence still rankled when I came into the dining room at tiffin time.  He was there on duty overlooking the Chinamen servants.  The tiffin was laid on one end only of the long table, and the punkah was stirring the hot air lazily—­mostly above a barren waste of polished wood.

We were four around the cloth.  The dozing stranger from the chair was one.  Both his eyes were partly opened now, but they did not seem to see anything.  He was supine.  The dignified person next him, with short side whiskers and a carefully scraped chin, was, of course, Hamilton.  I have never seen any one so full of dignity for the station in life Providence had been pleased to place him in.  I had been told that he regarded me as a rank outsider.  He raised not only his eyes, but his eyebrows as well, at the sound I made pulling back my chair.

Captain Giles was at the head of the table.  I exchanged a few words of greeting with him and sat down on his left.  Stout and pale, with a great shiny dome of a bald forehead and prominent brown eyes, he might have been anything but a seaman.  You would not have been surprised to learn that he was an architect.  To me (I know how absurd it is) to me he looked like a churchwarden.  He had the appearance of a man from whom you would expect sound advice, moral sentiments, with perhaps a platitude or two thrown in on occasion, not from a desire to dazzle, but from honest conviction.