well, the second of the ship
_Ferndale_, commanded by Roderick Anthony--the son of the poet, you
know."

"You are going to confess now that you have failed to find it out," I
said in pretended indignation.

"It would serve you right if I told you that I have. But I won't. I
haven't failed. I own though that for a time, I was puzzled. However,
I have now seen our Powell many times under the most favourable
conditions--and besides I came upon a most unexpected source of
information... But never mind that. The means don't concern you except
in so far as they belong to the story. I'll admit that for some time
the old-maiden-lady-like occupation of putting two and two together
failed to procure a coherent theory. I am speaking now as an
investigator--a man of deductions. With what we know of Roderick
Anthony and Flora de Barral I could not deduct an ordinary marital
quarrel beautifully matured in less than a year--could I. If you ask me
what is an ordinary marital quarrel I will tell you, that it is a
difference about nothing; I mean, these nothings which, as Mr Powell
told us when we first met him, shore people are so prone to start a row
about, and nurse into hatred from an idle sense of wrong, from perverted
ambition, for spectacular reasons too. There are on earth no actors too
humble and obscure not to have a gallery; that gallery which envenoms
the play by stealthy jeers, counsels of anger, amused comments or words
of perfidious compassion. However, the Anthonys were free from all
demoralising influences. At sea, you know, there is no gallery. You
hear no tormenting echoes of your own littleness there, where either a
great elemental voice roars defiantly under the sky or else an elemental
silence seems to be part of the infinite stillness of the universe."

Remembering Flora de Barral in the depths of moral misery, and Roderick
Anthony carried away by a gust of tempestuous tenderness, I asked
myself, Is it all forgotten already? What could they have found to
estrange them from each other with this rapidity and this thoroughness
so far from all temptations, in the peace of the sea and in an isolation
so complete that if it had not been the jealous devotion of the
sentimental Franklin stimulating the attention of Powell, there would
have been no record, no evidence of it at all.

I must confess at once that it was Flora de Barral whom I suspected. In
this world as at present organised women are the su