I was not, I am happy to say, in a position to deny this.  “What about the lady?” I could not help asking.  At this he gazed for a time into my face, earnestly, and made as if to change the subject.  I heard him beginning to mutter something unexpected, about his children growing old enough to require schooling.  He would have to leave them ashore with their grandmother when he took up that new command he expected to get in Germany.

This constant harping on his domestic arrangements was funny.  I suppose it must have been like the prospect of a complete alteration in his life.  An epoch.  He was going, too, to part with the Diana!  He had served in her for years.  He had inherited her.  From an uncle, if I remember rightly.  And the future loomed big before him, occupying his thought exclusively with all its aspects as on the eve of a venturesome enterprise.  He sat there frowning and biting his lip, and suddenly he began to fume and fret.

I discovered to my momentary amusement that he seemed to imagine I could, should or ought, have caused Falk in some way to pronounce himself.  Such a hope was incomprehensible, but funny.  Then the contact with all this foolishness irritated me.  I said crossly that I had seen no symptoms, but if there were any—­since he, Hermann, was so sure—­then it was still worse.  What pleasure Falk found in humbugging people in just that way I couldn’t say.  It was, however, my solemn duty to warn him.  It had lately, I said, come to my knowledge that there was a man (not a very long time ago either) who had been taken in just like this.

All this passed in undertones, and at this point Schomberg, exasperated at our secrecy, went out of the room slamming the door with a crash that positively lifted us in our chairs.  This, or else what I had said, huffed my Hermann, He supposed, with a contemptuous toss of his head towards the door which trembled yet, that I had got hold of some of that man’s silly tales.  It looked, indeed, as though his mind had been thoroughly poisoned against Schomberg.  “His tales were—­they were,” he repeated, seeking for the word—­“trash.”  They were trash, he reiterated, and moreover I was young yet . . .

This horrid aspersion (I regret I am no longer exposed to that sort of insult) made me huffy too.  I felt ready in my own mind to back up every assertion of Schomberg’s and on any subject.  In a moment, devil only knows why, Hermann and I were looking at each other most inimically.  He caught up his hat without more ado and I gave myself the pleasure of calling after him: 

“Take my advice and make Falk pay for breaking up your ship.  You aren’t likely to get anything else out of him.”

When I got on board my ship later on, the old mate, who was very full of the events of the morning, remarked: