ntional as ever. We have
outgrown so much of the sentimentalism of Love that muddle-headed
moderns imagine that we have outgrown Love itself. The keynote of
everything worthy in modern life and art and philosophy is--restraint.
I decline to regard ranting as eloquence because the Elizabethan
ranted well, and I decline also to accept the Shakesperian conception
of Love, viz., physical satiety, as the very latest thing in ideals.

Restraint, then! A marriage is doubtless, as Chesterton so admirably
puts it, a passionate compromise, but it does not follow that love is
therefore a compromising debauchery. It may be that I, who have my
ways far from feminine influence, tend to place women in a rarer and
purer atmosphere than most of them breathe, and that this tendency
unfits me for judging them accurately. Let it be so. Let my Welsh
Divinity watch me from beyond the dust-clouds of learning with her
grey eyes, while I pray never to lose my reverence for the quiet
loveliness of which she is, so unconsciously, the type.

XXXV

Once more I am out at sea. I have stowed away my "shore gear," slipped
the movable bar across my book-shelf, screwed up my windows, and made
all snug against the wind blowing up-channel. There is a gentle roll;
she is in ballast, for the Western Ocean, and the Mate does not smile
when we discuss the probable weather. He would like a little more
ballast, I know, and he thinks she "draws too much forrard." Well, I
am minded to go on deck for a smoke before I turn in. And the Third
Officer is on watch.

I call him the Innovation. There is to be much tallying on this
charter, and there is a happy rumour that the _Benvenuto_ will pay in
future. "I hear," said my friend the Mate, "I hear, Mr. McAlnwick,
that she has been reconstructed." By which he means that certain
financial props have been introduced into her economy, and she is no
longer in liquidation. The Mate glories in a four-hour watch, and the
Innovation takes the eight to twelve.

He walks across the bridge with a dozen swift strides. Then a peculiar
slew of his active little frame, and he whirls back to starboard. His
keen, clean-shaven face, hardened prematurely into an expression of
relentless ferocity, looks out from the peak of his badge-cap, the
strap cramming the crown against his bullet head. He is twenty-two,
and pure Liverpool. He served his apprenticeship in sail on the
Australian and Western American coasts. A middle class