could call his own in this world. A thick roll of charts in a sheath
of sailcloth leaned in a corner; the flat packing-case containing the
portrait in oils and the three carbon photographs had been pushed under
the bed. He was tired of discussing terms, of assisting at surveys, of
all the routine of the business. What to the other parties was merely
the sale of a ship was to him a momentous event involving a radically
new view of existence. He knew that after this ship there would be no
other; and the hopes of his youth, the exercise of his abilities, every
feeling and achievement of his manhood, had been indissolubly connected
with ships. He had served ships; he had owned ships; and even the years
of his actual retirement from the sea had been made bearable by the idea
that he had only to stretch out his hand full of money to get a ship. He
had been at liberty to feel as though he were the owner of all the
ships in the world. The selling of this one was weary work; but when
she passed from him at last, when he signed the last receipt, it was as
though all the ships had gone out of the world together, leaving him on
the shore of inaccessible oceans with seven hundred pounds in his hands.

Striding firmly, without haste, along the quay, Captain Whalley averted
his glances from the familiar roadstead. Two generations of seamen born
since his first day at sea stood between him and all these ships at the
anchorage. His own was sold, and he had been asking himself, What next?

From the feeling of loneliness, of inward emptiness,--and of loss
too, as if his very soul had been taken out of him forcibly,--there had
sprung at first a desire to start right off and join his daughter.
"Here are the last pence," he would say to her; "take them, my dear. And
here's your old father: you must take him too."

His soul recoiled, as if afraid of what lay hidden at the bottom of