mind floated in a sea of conjectures till the turn of the conversation enabled me, without being offensive, to remark that, upon the whole, this inquiry must have been pretty trying to him.  He darted his arm across the tablecloth, and clutching my hand by the side of my plate, glared fixedly.  I was startled.  “It must be awfully hard,” I stammered, confused by this display of speechless feeling.  “It is—­hell,” he burst out in a muffled voice.

’This movement and these words caused two well-groomed male globe-trotters at a neighbouring table to look up in alarm from their iced pudding.  I rose, and we passed into the front gallery for coffee and cigars.

’On little octagon tables candles burned in glass globes; clumps of stiff-leaved plants separated sets of cosy wicker chairs; and between the pairs of columns, whose reddish shafts caught in a long row the sheen from the tall windows, the night, glittering and sombre, seemed to hang like a splendid drapery.  The riding lights of ships winked afar like setting stars, and the hills across the roadstead resembled rounded black masses of arrested thunder-clouds.

’"I couldn’t clear out,” Jim began.  “The skipper did—­that’s all very well for him.  I couldn’t, and I wouldn’t.  They all got out of it in one way or another, but it wouldn’t do for me.”

’I listened with concentrated attention, not daring to stir in my chair; I wanted to know—­and to this day I don’t know, I can only guess.  He would be confident and depressed all in the same breath, as if some conviction of innate blamelessness had checked the truth writhing within him at every turn.  He began by saying, in the tone in which a man would admit his inability to jump a twenty-foot wall, that he could never go home now; and this declaration recalled to my mind what Brierly had said, “that the old parson in Essex seemed to fancy his sailor son not a little.”

’I can’t tell you whether Jim knew he was especially “fancied,” but the tone of his references to “my Dad” was calculated to give me a notion that the good old rural dean was about the finest man that ever had been worried by the cares of a large family since the beginning of the world.  This, though never stated, was implied with an anxiety that there should be no mistake about it, which was really very true and charming, but added a poignant sense of lives far off to the other elements of the story.  “He has seen it all in the home papers by this time,” said Jim.  “I can never face the poor old chap.”  I did not dare to lift my eyes at this till I heard him add, “I could never explain.  He wouldn’t understand.”  Then I looked up.  He was smoking reflectively, and after a moment, rousing himself, began to talk again.  He discovered at once a desire that I should not confound him with his partners in—­in crime, let us call it.  He was not one of them; he was altogether of another sort.  I gave no sign of dissent.  I had no intention, for the sake of barren truth, to rob him