warmly expressed the hope that we should see something of each other
there. This friendship of ours may seem to have been hastily hatched,
but it must be remembered that the sea is a great breeder of friendship.
Two men who have known each other for twenty years find that twenty days
at sea bring them nearer than ever they were before, or else estrange
them.

It was on this evening that, in a lull of the conversation, I casually
asked him when he had known Mrs. Falchion. His face was inscrutable, but
he said somewhat hurriedly, "In the South Sea Islands," and then changed
the subject. So, there was some mystery again? Was this woman never to
be dissociated from enigma? In those days I never could think of her
save in connection with some fatal incident in which she was scathless,
and some one else suffered.

It may have been fancy, but I thought that, during the first day or two
after leaving Aden, Galt Roscoe and Mrs. Falchion were very little
together. Then the impression grew that this was his doing, and again
that she waited with confident patience for the time when he would seek
her--because he could not help himself. Often when other men were paying
her devoted court I caught her eyes turned in his direction, and I
thought I read in her smile a consciousness of power. And it so was.
Very soon he was at her side. But I also noticed that he began to look
worn, that his conversation with me lagged. I think that at this time
I was so much occupied with tracing personal appearances to personal
influences that I lost to some degree the physician's practical keenness.
My eyes were to be opened. He appeared to be suffering, and she seemed
to unbend to him more than she ever unbent to me, or any one else on
board. Hungerford, seeing this, said to me one day in his blunt way:
"Marmion, old Ulysses knew what he was about when he tied himself to the