r be sea-sick than have the
hives."

Something went wrong with the men below us on the deck, some stupidity or
blunder that was made aware to us by Mr. Mellaire's raised voice. Like
Mr. Pike, he had a way of snarling at the sailors that was distinctly
unpleasant to the ear.

On the faces of several of the sailors bruises were in evidence. One, in
particular, had an eye so swollen that it was closed.

"Looks as if he had run against a stanchion in the dark," I observed.

Most eloquent, and most unconscious, was the quick flash of Miss West's
eyes to Mr. Pike's big paws, with freshly abraded knuckles, resting on
the rail. It was a stab of hurt to me. _She knew_.

CHAPTER X

That evening the three men of us had dinner alone, with racks on the
table, while the _Elsinore_ rolled in the calm that had sent Miss West to
her room.

"You won't see her for a couple of days," Captain West told me. "Her
mother was the same way--a born sailor, but always sick at the outset of
a voyage."

"It's the shaking down." Mr. Pike astonished me with the longest
observation I had yet heard him utter at table. "Everybody has to shake
down when they leave the land. We've got to forget the good times on
shore, and the good things money'll buy, and start watch and watch, four
hours on deck and four below. And it comes hard, and all our tempers are
strung until we can make the change. Did it happen that you heard Caruso
and Blanche Arral this winter in New York, Mr. Pathurst?"

I nodded, still marvelling over this spate of speech at table.

"Well, think of hearing them, and Homer, and Witherspoon, and Amato,
every night for nights and nights at the Metropolitan; and then to give
it the go-by, and get to sea and shake down to watch and watch."

"You don't like the sea?" I queried.

He sighed.

"I don't know. But of course the sea is all I know--"

"Except music," I threw in.

"Yes, but the sea and all the long-voyaging has cheated me out of most of
the music I oughta have had coming to me."

"I suppose you've heard Schumann Heink?"

"Wonderful, wonderful!" he murmured fervently, then regarded me with an
eager wistfulness. "I've half-a-dozen of her records, and I've got the
second dog-watch below. If Captain West don't mind . . . " (Captain
West nodded that he didn't mind). "And if you'd want to hear them? The
machine is a good one."

And then, to my amazement, when the steward had cleared the table, this