past midnight, long after the women had
retired. Hermann had been trading in the East for three years or more,
carrying freights of rice and timber mostly. His ship was well known in
all the ports from Vladivostok to Singapore. She was his own property.
The profits had been moderate, but the trade answered well enough while
the children were small yet. In another year or so he hoped he would
be able to sell the old Diana to a firm in Japan for a fair price. He
intended to return home, to Bremen, by mail boat, second class, with
Mrs. Hermann and the children. He told me all this stolidly, with slow
puffs at his pipe. I was sorry when knocking the ashes out he began
to rub his eyes. I would have sat with him till morning. What had I to
hurry on board my own ship for? To face the broken rifled drawer in my
state-room. Ugh! The very thought made me feel unwell.

I became their daily guest, as you know. I think that Mrs. Hermann from
the first looked upon me as a romantic person. I did not, of course,
tear my hair _coram populo_ over my loss, and she took it for lordly
indifference. Afterwards, I daresay, I did tell them some of my
adventures--such as they were--and they marvelled greatly at the extent
of my experience. Hermann would translate what he thought the most
striking passages. Getting up on his legs, and as if delivering a
lecture on a phenomenon, he addressed himself, with gestures, to the two
women, who would let their sewing sink slowly on their laps. Meantime
I sat before a glass of Hermann's beer, trying to look modest. Mrs.
Hermann would glance at me quickly, emit slight "Ach's!" The girl never
made a sound. Never. But she too would sometimes raise her pale eyes
to look at me in her unseeing gentle way. Her glance was by no means
stupid; it beamed out soft and diffuse as the moon beams upon a
landscape--quite differently from the scrutinising inspection of the
stars. You were drowned in it, and imagined yourself to appear blurred.
And yet this same glance when turned upon Christian Falk must have been
as efficient as the searchlight of a battle-ship.

Falk was the other assiduous visitor on board, but from his behaviour
he might have been coming to see the quarter-deck capstan. He certainly
used to stare at it a good deal when keeping us company outside the
cabin door, with one muscular arm thrown over the back of the chair, and
his big shapely legs, in very tight white trousers, extended far out and
ending