moment without moving and then shouted for
Mrs Brown. This was the steward's wife, his lucky inspiration to make
Flora comfortable. "Mrs Brown! Mrs Brown!" At last she appeared
from somewhere. "Mrs Anthony has come on board. Just gone into the
cabin. Hadn't you better see if you can be of any assistance?"

"Yes, sir."

And again he was alone with the situation he had created in the
hardihood and inexperience of his heart. He thought he had better go on
deck. In fact he ought to have been there before. At any rate it would
be the usual thing for him to be on deck. But a sound of muttering and
of faint thuds somewhere near by arrested his attention. They proceeded
from Mr Smith's room, he perceived. It was very extraordinary. "He's
talking to himself," he thought. "He seems to be thumping the bulkhead
with his fists--or his head."

Anthony's eyes grew big with wonder while he listened to these noises.
He became so attentive that he did not notice Mrs Brown till she
actually stopped before him for a moment to say:

"Mrs Anthony doesn't want any assistance, sir."

This was you understand the voyage before Mr Powell--young Powell
then--joined the _Ferndale_; chance having arranged that he should get
his start in life in that particular ship of all the ships then in the
port of London. The most unrestful ship that ever sailed out of any
port on earth. I am not alluding to her sea-going qualities. Mr
Powell tells me she was as steady as a church. I mean unrestful in the
sense, for instance in which this planet of ours is unrestful--a matter
of an uneasy atmosphere disturbed by passions, jealousies, loves, hates
and the troubles of transcendental good intentions, which, though
ethically valuable, I have no doubt cause often more unhappiness than
the plots of the most evil tendency. For those who refuse to believe in
chance he, I mean Mr Powell, must have been obviously predestined to
add his native ingenuousness to the sum of all the others carried by the
honest ship _Ferndale_. He was too ingenuous. Everybody on board was,
exception being made of Mr Smith who, however, was simple enough in his
way, with that terrible simplicity of the fixed idea, for which there is
also another name men pronounce with dread and aversion. His fixed idea
was to save his girl from the man who had possessed himself of her (I
use these words on purpose because the image they suggest was clearly in
Mr Smith's mind), posse