surdity was beginning at last to exercise its
well-known fascination. I felt I must not let the man talk to me any
more. I got up, observing curtly that he was too much for me--that I
couldn't make him out.

Before I had time to move away he spoke again in a changed tone of
obstinacy and puffing nervously at his pipe.

"Well--he's a--no account cuss--anyhow. You just--ask him. That's all."

That new manner impressed me--or rather made me pause. But sanity
asserting its sway at once I left the verandah after giving him a
mirthless smile. In a few strides I found myself in the dining room, now
cleared and empty. But during that short time various thoughts occurred
to me, such as: that Giles had been making fun of me, expecting some
amusement at my expense; that I probably looked silly and gullible; that
I knew very little of life. . . .

The door facing me across the dining room flew open to my extreme
surprise. It was the door inscribed with the word "Steward" and the
man himself ran out of his stuffy, Philistinish lair in his absurd,
hunted-animal manner, making for the garden door.

To this day I don't know what made me call after him. "I say! Wait a
minute." Perhaps it was the sidelong glance he gave me; or possibly I
was yet under the influence of Captain Giles' mysterious earnestness.
Well, it was an impulse of some sort; an effect of that force somewhere
within our lives which shapes them this way or that. For if these words
had not escaped from my lips (my will had nothing to do with that) my
existence would, to be sure, have been still a seaman's existence, but
directed on now to me utterly inconceivable lines.

No. My will had nothing to do with it. Indeed, no sooner had I made that
fateful noise than I became extremely sorry for it. Had the man stopped
and faced me I would have had to retire in disorder. For I had no notion
to carry out Captain Giles' idiotic joke, either at my own expense or at
the expense of the Steward.

But here the old human instinct of the chase came into play. He
pretended to be deaf, and I, without thinking a second about it, dashed
along my own side of the dining table and cut him off at the very door.

"Why can't you answer when you are spoken to?" I asked roughly.

He leaned against the lintel of the door. He looked extremely wretched.
Human nature is, I fear, not very nice right through. There are ugly
spots in it. I found myself growing angry, and that, I believe, only
be