er, and knew how fuel should be applied.

Casey made no pretence to love England. Gilbart never quite knew why he
tolerated him. But so it was: they had met in the reading-room of a
Sailors' Home, and had somehow struck up an acquaintance, even a sort of
unacknowledged friendship. Their common love of books may have helped;
for Casey--Heaven knew where or how--had picked up an education far
above Gilbart's, and amazing in a common stoker. Also he wore some
baffling, attractive mystery behind his reserve. Once or twice--
certainly not half a dozen times--he had at a casual word pulled open
for an instant the doors of his heart and given Gilbart a sensation of
looking into a furnace, into white-hot depths, sudden and frightening.
But what chiefly won him was the knowledge that in some perverse,
involuntary and quite inexplicable way he was liked by this sullen
fellow, who had no other friend and sought none. He knew the liking to
be there as surely as he knew it to be shy and sullen, curt in
expression, contemptuous of itself. Had he ever troubled to examine
himself honestly, Gilbart must have acknowledged himself Casey's
inferior in all but amiability; and Casey no doubt knew this. But in
friendship as in love there is usually one who likes and one who suffers
himself to be liked, and the positions are not allotted by merit.
Gilbart--a self-deceiver all his life--had accepted the compliment
complacently enough.

The _Berenice_ cleared the crowd and quickened her speed as the
five-minute gun puffed out from the committee-ship and the Blue Peter
ran up the halyards in the smoke. Gilbart turned his attention upon the
two big yachts and followed their movements until the starting-gun was
fired; saw them haul up and plunge over the line so close together that
the crews might have shaken hands; watched them as they fluttered out
their spinnakers for the run to the eastern mark, for all the world like
two great white moths floating side by side swiftly but with no show of
hurry. When he returned to the cruiser she was far away, almost off the
western end of the breakwater--gone, so far as he was concerned and
whoever else might be watching her from the shore; the parting over, the
threads torn and snapped, her crew face to face now with the long
voyage.

He drew a long breath, and was aware for the first time of a woman
standing about twenty yards on his left behind a group of chattering
holiday-makers. He saw at