mpty glass on the tray without
emotion. Mac and I sipped gently and waited for Mr. Carville to begin.

"I've been rather worried just lately, with one thing and another," he
observed, putting away his little brass tobacco-box. "Second went home
to get married last trip, and the Third, promoted, you understand, needs
an eye. Very willing and all that, but he's been in these big
hotel-ships, Western ocean all his life, and as I say, he needs an eye.
I was telling you about my brother, if I remember."

We murmured that he had, and watched Mr. Carville's obvious enjoyment of
his pipe.

"Ah!" he said, "the Brignole station in Genoa. Humph!"

"You see, my brother has something in his make-up that appeals to a
woman. I was going to say, all women. There's something spectacular, you
might say, in the way he carries on. I've never been able to decide
whether it's intentional or just fate. Anyhow, there it is; and if you
look at it in that light, it isn't so very wonderful after all that a
girl like Rosa was then should have been dazzled and carried away. When
she jumped up and stood staring at me, I hardly knew what to do. 'Rosa!'
I said, and we stood facing each other for a while. I don't know; but I
think we got to know each other better just then. For me, at any rate,
it was a revelation. They say a drowning man sees all his past life
while the water is pressing on his ear-drums. Something like that
happened to me then in that dismal, badly-lighted booking-hall. It
wasn't love, in the sugary sentimental sense, that I felt for Rosa; but
a blind, helpless sort of an emotion, a feeling that if I didn't get her
I was lost--lost! I put out my hands as though I was catching hold of
something to hold me up ... I felt her hands.

"I can hardly remember how we went away from there. I know the driver
shouted to me as we came out and I went up and paid him. And then we
were in the _Piazza Corvetto_, sitting on a seat, near where the
trolley-cars stop. How long we sat there I don't know either. I knew I'd
got her again. She was there, alongside, and we were talking, like two
children. I was very glad ... you know."

He paused, and we went on smoking and sipping, and Bill bent her head
over her needlework. I thought with a sudden and revealing vividness of
the woman who had said to me, in her gentle Italian voice, "He is a good
man." I think we were very glad too, though we did not say so.

"I can't tell you," he went on evenly, "w