be.

She had been a real shipmate and a true woman too. It was like an
article of faith with him that there never had been, and never could be,
a brighter, cheerier home anywhere afloat or ashore than his home under
the poop-deck of the Condor, with the big main cabin all white and gold,
garlanded as if for a perpetual festival with an unfading wreath. She
had decorated the center of every panel with a cluster of home flowers.
It took her a twelvemonth to go round the cuddy with this labor of love.
To him it had remained a marvel of painting, the highest achievement of
taste and skill; and as to old Swinburne, his mate, every time he
came down to his meals he stood transfixed with admiration before the
progress of the work. You could almost smell these roses, he declared,
sniffing the faint flavor of turpentine which at that time pervaded the
saloon, and (as he confessed afterwards) made him somewhat less hearty
than usual in tackling his food. But there was nothing of the sort to
interfere with his enjoyment of her singing. "Mrs. Whalley is a regular
out-and-out nightingale, sir," he would pronounce with a judicial air
after listening profoundly over the skylight to the very end of the
piece. In fine weather, in the second dog-watch, the two men could hear
her trills and roulades going on to the accompaniment of the piano in
the cabin. On the very day they got engaged he had written to London
for the instrument; but they had been married for over a year before it
reached them, coming out round the Cape. The big case made part of the
first direct general cargo landed in Hong-kong harbor--an event that to
the men who walked the busy quays of to-day seemed as hazily remote as
the dark ages of history. But Captain Whalley could in a half hour of
solitude live again all his life, with its romance, its idyl, and its
sorrow. He had to close her eyes himself. She went away from under the
ensign like a sailor's wife, a sailor herself at heart. He had read
the service over her, out of her own prayer-book, without a break in his
voice. When he raised his eyes he could see old Swinburne facing him
with his cap pressed to his breast, and his rugged, weather-beaten,
impassive face streaming with drops of water like a lump of chipped red
granite in a shower. It was all very well for that old sea-dog to cry.
He had to read on to the end; but after the splash he did not remember
much of what happened for the next few days. An elderly sa