with corns. And Mr. Reginald Spokesly was intensely preoccupied with women. He had often sighed, on the bridge, as he reflected what he might do "if he only had the means." Perhaps, when he got a command.... He would halt short at this, suddenly remembering the bargain he had picked up.

But it must not be for one moment imagined, when I speak of Mr. Spokesly as being at that time a gentleman of indifferent calibre, that he was so regarded by himself or his world afloat or ashore. Indeed, he was a rather magnificent person. He played his cards very well. He "kept his ears open and his mouth shut," as he himself put it. He had once confided to Mr. Chippenham, the third officer, that "there was jobs goin' just now, soft things, too, if y' only wait." The third officer was not directly interested, for he knew well enough that he himself stood no chance in that gamble. But he was impressed by Mr. Spokesly's—the second officer's—exquisite fitness for any such jobs. Even the Old Man, taciturn, distant, and dignified as he was, was not up to Mr. Spokesly. Who had so slow and so deliberate a walk? Who could treat the common people of the ship, the sailors, the firemen, the engineers and wireless boys, with such lofty condescension? It was a lesson in deportment to see him stroll into the chief engineer's room and extend himself on that gentleman's settee. It was unfortunately true that some of those common people treated Mr. Spokesly, not as a commander in posse, not as one of those select beings born to rule, but as one of themselves. Mr. Chippenham remembered with pain one incident which showed this only too clearly. They were watching a destroyer coming into port, her decks lined with bluejackets, her three funnels belching oil-smoke, her semaphore working. As she swung round astern of them, Mr. Spokesly, who had been pacing to and fro paring his nails, joined the little group at the rail, nodding in majestic approval.

"Ah," he remarked in his loose-lipped, husky drawl, "I sh'd like to 'andle one o' them little things meself."

And to this the third engineer, his greasy arms asprawl on the rail, had looked over his shoulder and remarked:

"You! I'd like to see you! You'd pile her up on the beach before you'd had her five minutes, that's what you'd do."

It was a vile, gratuitous insult, the third officer had thought hotly, and he had watched Mr. Spokesly do the only thing possible, walk grandly away. That was the worst of those beastly engineers. If you gave them an inch they'd take a mile. And he made a mental note of what he would do when he attained to command—some twenty years ahead.

But this was, I am glad to say, an exceptional incident. Circumstances as a rule favoured the development of Mr. Spokesly's amour propre and he brooded with intense absorption upon his own greatness. Now this greatness was a very intricate affair. It was inextricably tangled up with the individual soul known as Reginald Spokesly, Esquire, of Thames Road, Twickenham, England, and the unit of the Merchant Service known as R. Spokesly, second officer, S. S. Tanganyika, a member of what is called "the cloth." Perhaps it would be better to include another manifestation of greatness, which was Mr. Spokesly's tremendous power over women. His own explanation of this last phenomenon was that he "kept them in their place." To him they were mere playthings of an idle hour. Perhaps his desire was most aroused by stories of Oriental domesticity, and he almost regretted not being born a pasha, where his abilities as a woman tamer could have had more scope. However, he did not read a great deal. In fact, he could hardly be said to read at all. He patronized a book now and then by falling asleep over it.

In the early days of the war, Mr. Spokesly's light had been hidden for some years in the Far East. Indeed, when I think of the sort of life he was gradually subsiding into out there, I sometimes wonder if he would ever have attained to such a capacity for moral effort as he afterwards displayed unless the war had evoked the illusion that he ought to go home and enlist, and so had opened to him the wealth of bargains to be picked up in England. That, at any rate, had been his ostensible reason for quitting the peculiar mixture of tropical languor and brisk modernity which had been his life for nearly four years. Perhaps it was not so much love of country as personal destiny, for Mr. Spokesly had a very real belief in his destiny. Here again his greatness, which was of course the warp and woof of his destiny, showed a pattern of perplexing intricacy. He regarded himself with approval. He was putting on weight. A vigorous man of thirty-odd, coming thousands of miles across the ocean to fight for his country! He read the roll of honour each week in the papers that met them on the homeward voyage, and the page blurred to his sight as he gazed through it into the future. You might almost, he reflected, count out those who were wounded and missing as well! Whether he had ever had any genuine intention of becoming a soldier I do not know. He had a remarkably strong instinct of self-preservation; but then many soldiers have that. As the liner neared home, however, Mr. Spokesly's thoughts centred more and more truly about himself and his immediate future. The seraglios he had quitted in Singapore and Kobe and Rangoon were, in his own words, "a thing o' the past." The time, "the psychological moment," as he phrased it without in the least knowing what the word meant, was come when he would have to marry or, at any rate, become engaged. He was not, he told himself, "pertickler." He reckoned he could fall in love with almost anybody who wasn't too old or too ugly, and providing always that she had "a dot." He was a stern believer in a dot, even though he did not know how to pronounce it. Looming behind the steep hill leading to a command were the happy mountain valleys of a comfortable independence. To marry money! Now he came to think of it, it had been the pervading ambition of his life. And here was his chance. He pulled down his vest and settled his tie as he thought of the golden future before him. He had a vision of an England full of consolable fiancées, young ladies of wealth, beauty, and position, sobbing gently for departed heroes, but willing to be comforted....

It did not turn out that way, of course. Indeed, his first experience on arrival was of an England of brisk, determined young women making munitions, clipping tickets, and conducting street cars, and he was angered at the unwomanliness of it all. Woman's place, he had always believed, was in the harem. He had held, when lying in his hammock out East and lazily reading the home news of suffrage riots, that the Government "ought to have tied some of 'em up and horse-whipped 'em." But he left the Metropolis behind as soon as possible, and went down to stay with his family at Twickenham. And it was here, on a perfect day in late autumn, that Ada Rivers, living with her married sister at Richmond, brought balm to his wounded spirit.

From the very first day, spent in a punt at Kingston, she had struck the right note of adoration. He had been telling her how his last ship had been sunk by the Emden, and was going on to say he had providentially left her just before, when she broke in ecstatically: "And you went through it all?" He hesitated for a moment, and she followed this up with, "How glorious! You have been doing your bit!" She leaned back on the cushions and gazed at him with shining gray eyes as he poled her gently along, his large hairy arms, one of them clasped by a wrist watch, outstretched above her, as though in some mystic benediction, his loose mouth and double chin pendulous with the delicious flattery. For she was a fine girl—he realized that immediately his sister had introduced him. She made him feel his masculinity. He liked to think afterwards of how deliberately he had made his choice.

He floated for a time in a dream of sensuous delight, for she was one of those girls who