nt medicine in which his own belief was absolute. "I'll tell you
what I'll do. I'll buy you two bottles, out of my own pocket. There. I
can't say fairer than that, can I?"

I believe he would have perpetrated the atrocity (or generosity) at the
merest sign of weakening on my part. By that time, however, I was more
discontented, disgusted, and dogged than ever. The past eighteen months,
so full of new and varied experience, appeared a dreary, prosaic waste
of days. I felt--how shall I express it?--that there was no truth to be
got out of them.

What truth? I should have been hard put to it to explain. Probably, if
pressed, I would have burst into tears simply. I was young enough for
that.

Next day the Captain and I transacted our business in the Harbour
Office. It was a lofty, big, cool, white room, where the screened light
of day glowed serenely. Everybody in it--the officials, the public--were
in white. Only the heavy polished desks gleamed darkly in a central
avenue, and some papers lying on them were blue. Enormous punkahs sent
from on high a gentle draught through that immaculate interior and upon
our perspiring heads.

The official behind the desk we approached grinned amiably and kept it
up till, in answer to his perfunctory question, "Sign off and on again?"
my Captain answered, "No! Signing off for good." And then his grin
vanished in sudden solemnity. He did not look at me again till he
handed me my papers with a sorrowful expression, as if they had been my
passports for Hades.

While I was putting them away he murmured some question to the Captain,
and I heard the latter answer good-humouredly:

"No. He leaves us to go home."

"Oh!" the other exclaimed, nodding mournfully over my sad condition.

I didn't know him outside the official building, but he leaned forward
the desk to shake hands with me, compassionately, as one would with some
poor devil going out to be hanged; and I am afraid I performed my part
ungraciously, in the hardened manner of an impenitent criminal.

No homeward-bound mail-boat was due for three or four days. Being now a
man without a ship, and having for a time broken my connection with the
sea--become, in fact, a mere potential passenger--it would have been
more appropriate perhaps if I had gone to stay at an hotel. There it
was, too, within a stone's throw of the Harbour Office, low, but somehow
palatial, displaying its white, pillared pavilions surrounded by trim
grass plots