"The brig was sliding down the seas like a boy let loose from school"
flashed through his mind: the perfect poem seemed strangely interpretative of his mood. Then his gaze came back from the notched and leaping horizon to the silent figure of Hetty, and, with the lifting spirit of a mind released from the oppression of a strange and portentous solitude, he clumsily made his way to her side, glad for companionship.

She looked up brightly.

"Oh," she said, "I was wishing for some one to enjoy it with. I tried to get my mother, but she would not come up. She said she could feel it; that was enough for her. I hope it is not enough for you."

"No," he answered; "there is more in seeing it: it is strange and overwhelming. I am inland-bred, you know: I feel as if all known things had passed away."

"To me it is like coming home," she declared. "I cannot remember when it was not familiar. Now it is like lifting the latch of the door at home after a long absence."He shook his head, smiling.

"I cannot imagine any one thinking of it as companionable, as a part of actual experience. I need hills and old trees and remembered turns in roads to feel the intimacy of the world. This is strange and beautiful, but leaves me an alien. It is like a kaleidoscope: nothing is twice the same."

"I do not care for things that are twice the same," she told him. "Here something is always likely to happen. The only certain thing I know of to-morrow is that we shall have plum-duff." She laughed.

He looked at her, gravely smiling.

"A certain noble discontent—you know the thought—is well; but—" he was thinking of her mother's concern, and her words carried him toward it; yet he hesitated, doubtful if it might not be too soon to speak—"but constant change means lack of purpose, doesn't it? If you set your heart on something,—something vastly different from anything you have ever known,—it will be fruitless of good unless persisted in—unless it wears grooves in your life. A mere impulse for change is to be distrusted." He smiled and added: "Don't think that I cannot give over preaching."

"I know what you mean," replied the girl, looking seaward with troubled eyes. "I suppose mother has told you what I wish. But it isn't a mere desire for change, and everybody's disapproval only makes me more eager to go. Isn't that a proof that the desire is something to be obeyed—a real call? How can I be sure that it is not, unless I try? Do you think me a silly person?" She looked at him with a suggestion of defiance, but smilingly, too.

"I should be the last one to think that," he told her. "Only look at it from all sides—that is all your friends can ask."

"Not father," she answered laughingly. "If I can be made to look at it from his point of view, he will willingly spare me the rest. Poor father! But let's not speak of it," she went on. "Look! the Mother Carey's chicken!"

She pointed to the bird, the black-and-white little creature which always seems to be hurrying home, wherever it may be. Far to the southeast a trail of smoke from an unseen steamer blotched the white sky. On the main-deck the second mate and a sailor were patching a topsail; from the galley drifted aft the cheerful whistling of the steward, like a flock of blackbirds, and the homelike sound of rattling pans. Only the man at the wheel was aft, now bending to the spokes, now glancing at the binnacle, and now turning his eye aloft to the luff of the mainsail. It was the morning of the third day out.

Drew was silent so long that she turned a troubled face to him.

"You must not think that I do not care for your advice," she said gently; "I do—shall some day. Just now I cannot bear to speak of my disappointment. It wasn't a sudden impulse; it was a part of my life, and it must be given up, perhaps. After a little, when I can collect my scattered forces, if you can help me—" She smiled uncertainly.

"I know, I know," he hastened to say. "But I was really thinking of something quite different—that three days ago I had not even seen you; now our lives seem intimately near. Only at sea could that happen."

"Yes," she agreed; "people grow into friendship quickly at sea—and grow apart as quickly. I have heard my father say that is a reason for the cruelty and harshness on shipboard—that men's tempers become warped when they cannot escape from one another and they find no common ground for companionship. He says there have been times when he fairly hated a mate of his. On shore they might have been intimate for years without an unpleasant thought."

"Let us hope that we may escape that disaster," he said, with a smile.

He wondered if Medbury had been in her thoughts. They had scarcely spoken, he had observed. He himself had seen little of the younger man, and he was quite prepared to rate him her inferior, in spite of his physical attractiveness. He seemed a mere boy in his impulses; he doubted not that he would keep his boyishness to the end of life. Certainly, he told himself, he was lacking in her capacity for growth.

Meanwhile his own first opinion of her beauty had not changed; it was as apparent as ever, he told himself, and had taken on an added grace with his widening knowledge of her many changing moods. As he gazed at her now, he had an impression of distinction, but distinction united with a certain gentleness that, he told himself, was rare. Her face was in profile, and the mouth, clear-cut and undrooping, had the softness of outline that he associated with good temper. Her eyes, though now sad, had the same gentle look. He liked her thick brown hair and the clear oval of her face: they gave him the impression of harmony. In spite of his first feeling of attraction for Medbury, he felt that the girl hesitated wisely; he could see no road by which the two could travel as equal companions. That Medbury's hopes seemed destined to be shattered did not move him greatly; for rarely to the masculine onlooker is the disappointed lover a tragic figure. One has seen him play his game and lose; now let him bear the loss manfully.

They did not speak of her desire again that day; indeed, eight days passed before he ventured to refer to it. Meanwhile they had become great friends. The pleasant weather had held, and they had rolled down the long, smooth seas, which daily seemed to grow bluer, under a sky that remained cloudless.

It was morning again, the morning of the eleventh day out, and they sat in the same place, with much the same scene about them, though now with a tropical softness flooding the world, and less heeded as their thoughts turned more to themselves. He had been reading aloud while she worked at some trifle, but suddenly he closed the book.

"That is enough of other men's dreams," he said. "What of yours?"

She did not even look up as she replied:

"Mine are poor enough; I prefer those of others. Besides, I have scarcely thought of them for days."

"Are they less insistent?" he asked.

"Don't!" she appealed. "Don't! I am not yet ready to face them. I have lost my courage.""I will say no more," he said; "but I had thought that you seemed different—ready to surrender. I had hoped so."

She looked up now.

"Are you against me, too?" she demanded.

"Can you believe that?" he asked. "I had thought that I was for you—as we all are."

She smiled.

"You are all making it very hard for me," she told him.

A step sounded on the forward companionway, and Medbury appeared. He glanced past them to the man at the wheel, looked aloft, then walked slowly to the break of the deck. Suddenly he came back and seated himself on the corner of the house near them. Apparently he had wearied of self-suppression.

He was manifestly trying to appear wholly at ease, and he began to talk at once, and very rapidly, like one repeating a speech that had been learned by heart. He spoke of the wind and the run of the vessel, and he told them that they had not touched a sheet for more than sixty hours. He said he hoped that it would last, though he added that he doubted it.

"When ought we to get out, Tom?" asked Hetty. She bit off her thread as she spoke, and, spreading her work on her lap, examined it absent-mindedly.

"If the wind holds, in four or five days," he answered; "but I'm afraid it won't. The sea's beginning to look oily now; the snap has gone out of the wind. We'll be slatting and rolling in a dead calm by the middle of the afternoon. I noticed the change in my bunk, and couldn't sleep."

"I thought sailors could always sleep." This was Hetty's contribution to the conversation as she still studied her work.

"Well, I couldn't," he answered."Then we may be three weeks going out," said Drew. "It seems like a long time."

"I was a hundred and twenty days on my last voyage—from Singapore," said Medbury.

"I am beginning to grasp the reason for the sailor's rapt, far-seeing look," said Drew. "It is not strange that he never loses it, with his constant study of invisible signs and meanings. But a hundred and twenty days! What changes may take place in that time!"

"We find changes enough," Medbury answered. "Sometimes I think we sailors are the only things that do not change, except to grow older and sadder. We always hope to find everything just as we left it, but we never do."

Hetty looked steadily seaward, and a fine flush came to her face; but Drew was struck with the philosophy of the situation."That surely ought to be true," he acquiesced—"that the sailor is the most unchanging of men. One should come back wiser in sea-lore, but solitude and the singleness of his purpose should keep him untouched by all the distractions that change other men. I've noticed in Blackwater the freshness of spirit, almost boyishness, of old men."

Hetty's face was turned forward, and now she leaped to her feet.

"What is that, Tom?" she exclaimed. "We are running on a sand-bar!"

A hundred yards ahead of them stretched a great golden-brown field that looked like a salt-meadow in April. Above it wheeled a flock of sea-birds.

Medbury scarcely turned his head.

"Sargasso weed," he answered, and grinned. "It's always waltzing about in these latitudes."

The girl walked to the main-rigging, and, leaning across the sheer-pole, watched the yellow plain with wondering eyes. A moment later, as they plunged into it, she caught her breath; it seemed incredible to her that there should be no shock.

Instantly the sounds of the sea were hushed; there was only the soft hissing of the weed as it swept past the side of the brig.

"Come up to the forecastle-deck and see it pile up on the bow," Medbury said to the girl.

She did not stir.

"Won't you come?"

"No," she answered.

He leaned across the sheer-pole with her a moment in silence. The bell forward struck four sharp strokes; it was like a cry in the night. Then a sailor came lurching aft to relieve the man at the wheel.

"Is it always going to be like this, Hetty?" Medbury asked her in a low voice."I suppose so."

"You want it so?"

"I said, 'I suppose so.'"

"It's the same thing," he remarked drearily, and sighed.

The sigh seemed to irritate her, for she turned upon him suddenly.

"Why did you speak like that—before a stranger?"

"Like what?" he asked, in astonishment.

"About coming home unchanged, and finding nothing as you had left it. Of course he knew what you meant. And it wasn't true, for I have not changed. I could have sunk through the deck for shame."

"Oh, that," he replied. "He didn't understand; he thought it was a text."

"A text!" She turned away in scorn.

A moment he stood looking outboard with unseeing eyes; then he stooped and drew a boat-hook from the slings beneath the rail."Wouldn't you like to have a piece?" he asked, pointing to the seaweed.

She hesitated a moment, and then came back to his side.

"Yes," she said.

He drew in a great bunch and spread it at her feet, and she picked up a bit with dainty fingers.

"It's no longer beautiful," she said in disappointment, and dropped it on the house.

"No," he answered soberly, and tossed the weed back into the sea.