her sewing—­eternally sewing—­with that industrious and precise movement of her arm, going on eternally upon all the oceans, under all the skies, in innumerable harbours.  And suddenly I heard Falk’s voice declare that he could not marry a woman unless she knew of something in his life that had happened ten years ago.  It was an accident.  An unfortunate accident.  It would affect the domestic arrangements of their home, but, once told, it need not be alluded to again for the rest of their lives.  “I should want my wife to feel for me,” he said.  “It has made me unhappy.”  And how could he keep the knowledge of it to himself—­he asked us—­perhaps through years and years of companionship?  What sort of companionship would that be?  He had thought it over.  A wife must know.  Then why not at once?  He counted on Hermann’s kindness for presenting the affair in the best possible light.  And Hermann’s countenance, mystified before, became very sour.  He stole an inquisitive glance at me.  I shook my head blankly.  Some people thought, Falk went on, that such an experience changed a man for the rest of his life.  He couldn’t say.  It was hard, awful, and not to be forgotten, but he did not think himself a worse man than before.  Only he talked in his sleep now, he believed. . . .  At last I began to think he had accidentally killed some one; perhaps a friend—­his own father maybe; when he went on to say that probably we were aware he never touched meat.  Throughout he spoke English, of course of my account.

He swayed forward heavily.

The girl, with her hands raised before her pale eyes, was threading her needle.  He glanced at her, and his mighty trunk overshadowed the table, bringing nearer to us the breadth of his shoulders, the thickness of his neck, and that incongruous, anchorite head, burnt in the desert, hollowed and lean as if by excesses of vigils and fasting.  His beard flowed imposingly downwards, out of sight, between the two brown hands gripping the edge of the table, and his persistent glance made sombre by the wide dilations of the pupils, fascinated.

“Imagine to yourselves,” he said in his ordinary voice, “that I have eaten man.”

I could only ejaculate a faint “Ah!” of complete enlightenment.  But Hermann, dazed by the excessive shock, actually murmured, “Himmel!  What for?”

“It was my terrible misfortune to do so,” said Falk in a measured undertone.  The girl, unconscious, sewed on.  Mrs. Hermann was absent in one of the state-rooms, sitting up with Lena, who was feverish; but Hermann suddenly put both his hands up with a jerk.  The embroidered calotte fell, and, in the twinkling of an eye, he had rumpled his hair all ends up in a most extravagant manner.  In this state he strove to speak; with every effort his eyes seemed to start further out of their sockets; his head looked like a mop.  He choked, gasped, swallowed, and managed to shriek out the one word, “Beast!”