about it: Certainly, Captain. And we will manage her for you, if
you like, as if she were still our own. . . Why, with a connection
like that it was good investment to buy that ship. Good! Aye, at
the time."

The turning of his head slightly toward me at this point was like a
sign of strong feeling in any other man.

"You'll mind that this was long before Cloete came into it at all,"
he muttered, warningly.

"Yes. I will mind," I said. "We generally say: some years
passed. That's soon done."

He eyed me for a while silently in an unseeing way, as if engrossed
in the thought of the years so easily dealt with; his own years,
too, they were, the years before and the years (not so many) after
Cloete came upon the scene. When he began to speak again, I
discerned his intention to point out to me, in his obscure and
graphic manner, the influence on George Dunbar of long association
with Cloete's easy moral standards, unscrupulously persuasive gift
of humour (funny fellow), and adventurously reckless disposition.
He desired me anxiously to elaborate this view, and I assured him
it was quite within my powers. He wished me also to understand
that George's business had its ups and downs (the other brother was
meantime sailing to and fro serenely); that he got into low water
at times, which worried him rather, because he had married a young
wife with expensive tastes. He was having a pretty anxious time of
it generally; and just then Cloete ran up in the city somewhere
against a man working a patent medicine (the fellow's old trade)