pect me to give you vivid accounts of passionate
declarations of love under the Mediterranean moon, or of desperate
knife-work in the dark with Artemisia bending over the dying man and
kissing his death-dewed forehead in a last farewell. The voyage went on
much as usual outwardly. The days are gone, if they ever existed, when
love ruled the camp or the quarter deck. Yet there was a subtle change.
Men went about their various tasks with an air of charged expectancy.
Now and again a couple could be seen talking earnestly together. The
weather, until we passed Gibraltar, was against any dramatic
developments. Mrs. Evans and Angelina kept below. Only once, at dusk,
while we were passing the Burlings, off Portugal, I looked over the rail
of the bridge-deck and saw young Siddons leaning on the bulwarks below,
his head turned toward someone I could not see. He was laughing as
happily as a child. Leaning over a little further I saw a girl's finely
articulated hand and a corner of a white apron.

"But most of us had no chance. It sounds a strange thing to say, but it
was almost as if Mrs. Evans herself regarded me as married to her. As
though because I had been the means of their meeting, I was entitled to
a sort of founder's share in Angelina! I was in the way to becoming an
expert in infant's complaints. And Jack seemed to think that when I came
into the cabin to talk, he had the right of going off duty, so to speak,
and would go up to the chart room to have a smoke. No, I didn't go
simply to catch a glimpse of Artemisia, though she was worth glimpsing.
I went from a sense of social duty. I felt I owed it to Jack to be
sociable with his wife. And perhaps, too, there was an idea at the back
of my head that contact with Mrs. Evans was a corrective to any tendency
I might have to make a fool of myself over any young woman. That was
Mrs. Evans' specialty, you might say. She didn't mean it, but
unconsciously she shrivelled at the least breath of desire. I used to
watch apprehensively for the blank look in the eyes, the tightening of
the lips, the infinitesimal drawing back of the head, as of a snake
about to strike. There was something sharply astringent about her then,
like biting inadvertently into a green banana. And yet she had her gusts
of enthusiasm over 'darling Babs.' The child was a monster of egoism, as
may be imagined. She was very like her father physically--full-blooded,
plump, bold-eyed, and with a perfectly devilish t