ying the place and the people, Drislane ordered supper.
I paid no attention to him until he joggled my elbow. "What do you think
of her?" he asked.

"Which one?" I asked, and looked about me afresh to note what worshipful
creature it was I had missed.

"You didn't notice," he said, plainly put out with me, "the girl who is
waiting on us?"

I had noticed her; but when she reappeared with the first part of our
order, I noticed anew. A tall, full-bosomed girl she was, and as she
walked across the floor toward us, a load of table things in each hand,
she swayed from her hips like a young tree in the wind.

The physical force and poise of the girl was the notable thing about
her. She carried her armfuls of dishes and food as if they were handfuls
of marshmallows. She must have spent years working like a man in the
fields to have developed such physical power. As to her face--it was
innocent as a child's.

He introduced me when she had set down her dishes. "Miss Rose"---- I
didn't get her surname, and it doesn't matter. "Rose's uncle owns this
place," he added.

"Poor girl!" I thought.

She met his enchanted gaze with a slow, red-lipped smile. To me she gave
an embarrassed, half-sidewise glance. Strange men as yet were evidently
disturbing items in her life.

He watched her when she left us, until she had passed through the
kitchen-door and beyond sight. "I'm going to marry and settle down," he
said.

"This young lady?"

"If she'll have me. I haven't asked her yet." He was fiddling with his
bread and butter. Suddenly he burst out with: "If you knew how lonesome
I used to get, and the things I was tempted to do to forget it!"

"A man doesn't need, son, to be entirely exiled from his family to
believe that; but when you're married will you go to sea just the same?"
I asked.

He did not answer.

I felt sorry for him. She looked to be a good girl, but I foresaw her
troubles in a place like this while he would be away to sea. It would be
a constant fight. She was possibly nineteen; she didn't look like a girl
who had been tempered by temptation's long siege, and Lord knows what
resisting power she would develop when so tempted.

From the fragments Drislane fed me with while she was coming and going,
I learned that both her parents were dead, that she had been in the city
only three months, that her uncle didn't seem to see anything strange in
her employment in his place, and that Drislane was the first man who h