ce look stiff. His whole manner, tense
and nervous, was the expression of a passionate desire to excel.

Claude seemed to himself to be leading a double life these days.
When he was working over Fanning, or was down in the hold helping
to take care of the sick soldiers, he had no time to think,--did
mechanically the next thing that came to hand. But when he had an
hour to himself on deck, the tingling sense of ever-widening
freedom flashed up in him again. The weather was a continual
adventure; he had never known any like it before. The fog, and
rain, the grey sky and the lonely grey stretches of the ocean
were like something he had imagined long ago--memories of old sea
stories read in childhood, perhaps--and they kindled a warm spot
in his heart. Here on the Anchises he seemed to begin where
childhood had left off. The ugly hiatus between had closed up.
Years of his life were blotted out in the fog. This fog which had
been at first depressing had become a shelter; a tent moving
through space, hiding one from all that had been before, giving
one a chance to correct one's ideas about life and to plan the
future. The past was physically shut off; that was his illusion.
He had already travelled a great many more miles than were told
off by the ship's log. When Bandmaster Fred Max asked him to play
chess, he had to stop a moment and think why it was that game had
such disagreeable associations for him. Enid's pale, deceptive
face seldom rose before him unless some such accident brought it
up. If he happened to come upon a group of boys talking about
their sweethearts and war-brides, he listened a moment and then
moved away with the happy feeling that he was the least married
man on the boat.

There was plenty of deck room, now that so many men were ill
either from seasickness or the epidemic, and sometimes he and
Albert Usher had the stormy side of the boat almost to
themselves. The Marine was the best sort of companion for these
gloomy days; steady, quiet, self-reliant. And he, too, was always
looking forward. As for Victor Morse, Claude was growing
positively fond of him. Victor had tea in a special corner of the
officers' smoking-room every afternoon--he would have perished
without it--and the steward always produced some special
garnishes of toast and jam or sweet biscuit for him. Claude
usually managed to join him at that hour.

On the day of Tannhauser's funeral he went into the smoking-room
at four. Victor bec