had received that voyage from his owners. Where was it? The missis
knew, and he looked over his shoulder for her. But she was not there.

They must have been the days to live in, when China was like that, and
there was all the East, and such ships, and men who were seamen and
navigators in a way that is lost. As the old master mariner, who had
lived in that time, would sometimes demand of me: What is the sea now?
Steamers do not make time, or lose it. They keep it. They run to
schedule, one behind the other, in processions. They have nothing to
overcome. They do not fail, and they cannot triumph. They are
predestined engines, and the sea is but their track. Yet it had been
otherwise. And the old man would brood into the greater past, his
voice would grow quiet, and he would gently emphasize his argument by
letting one hand, from a fixed wrist, rise, and fall sadly on the
table, in a gesture of solemn finality. He was in that act, early one
evening, while his wife was reading a newspaper; and I had risen to go,
and stood for a moment silent in the thought that these of ours were
lesser days, and their petty demands and trivial duties made of men but
mere attendants on uninspiring process.

Serene Mrs. Williams, reading her paper, and not in our world at all,
at that moment struck the paper into her lap, and fixed me with
surprise and shock in her eyes, as though she had just repelled that
mean print in a malicious attempt at injury. Her husband took no
notice. She handed me the paper, with a finger on a paragraph. "The
steamer _Arab_, which sailed on December 26 last for Buenos Aires, has
not been heard of since that date, and today was 'posted' as missing."

I remembered then a young man in uniform, with a rakish cap, trying to
find a key while a girl was laughing at him. As I left the house I