I glanced round at Davies. He had dropped the chart and was sitting,
or rather half lying, on the deck with one bronzed arm over the
tiller, gazing fixedly ahead, with just an occasional glance around
and aloft. He still seemed absorbed in himself, and for a moment or
two I studied his face with an attention I had never, since I had
known him, given it. I had always thought it commonplace, as I had
thought him commonplace, so far as I had thought at all about either.
It had always rather irritated me by an excess of candour and
boyishness. These qualities it had kept, but the scales were falling
from my eyes, and I saw others. I saw strength to obstinacy and
courage to recklessness, in the firm lines of the chin; an older and
deeper look in the eyes. Those odd transitions from bright mobility
to detached earnestness, which had partly amused and chiefly annoyed
me hitherto, seemed now to be lost in a sensitive reserve, not cold
or egotistic, but strangely winning from its paradoxical frankness.
Sincerity was stamped on every lineament. A deep misgiving stirred me
that, clever as I thought myself, nicely perceptive of the right and
congenial men to know, I had made some big mistakes--how many, I
wondered? A relief, scarcely less deep because it was unconfessed,
stole in on me with the suspicion that, little as I deserved it, the
patient fates were offering me a golden chance of repairing at least
one. And yet, I mused, the patient fates have crooked methods,
besides a certain mischievous humour, for it was Davies who had asked
me out--though now he scarcely seemed to need me--almost tricked me
into coming out, for he might have known I was not suited to such a
life; yet trickery and Davies sounded an odd conjuncture.

Probably it was the growing discomfort of my attitude which produced
this backsliding. My night's rest and the 'ascent from the bath' had,
in fact, done little to prepare me for contact with sharp edges and