“You would never believe it,” I cried. “It was a notification that a master is wanted for some ship. There’s a command apparently going about and this fellow puts the thing in his pocket.”

The Steward screamed out in accents of loud despair: “You will be the death of me!”

The mighty slap he gave his wretched forehead was very loud, too. But when I turned to look at him he was no longer there. He had rushed away somewhere out of sight. This sudden disappearance made me laugh.

This was the end of the incident—for me. Captain Giles, however, staring at the place where the Steward had been, began to haul at his gorgeous gold chain till at last the watch came up from the deep pocket like solid truth from a well. Solemnly he lowered it down again and only then said:

“Just three o’clock. You will be in time—if you don’t lose any, that is.”

“In time for what?” I asked.

“Good Lord! For the Harbour Office. This must be looked into.

Strictly speaking, he was right. But I’ve never had much taste for investigation, for showing people up and all that no doubt ethically meritorious kind of work. And my view of the episode was purely ethical. If any one had to be the death of the Steward I didn’t see why it shouldn’t be Captain Giles himself, a man of age and standing, and a permanent resident. Whereas, I in comparison, felt myself a mere bird of passage in that port. In fact, it might have been said that I had already broken off my connection. I muttered that I didn’t think—it was nothing to me.…

“Nothing!” repeated Captain Giles, giving some signs of quiet, deliberate indignation. “Kent warned me you were a peculiar young fellow. You will tell me next that a command is nothing to you—and after all the trouble I’ve taken, too!”

“The trouble!” I murmured, uncomprehending. What trouble? All I could remember was being mystified and bored by his conversation for a solid hour after tiffin. And he called that taking a lot of trouble.

He was looking at me with a self-complacency which would have been odious in any other man. All at once, as if a page of a book had been turned over disclosing a word which made plain all that had gone before, I perceived that this matter had also another than an ethical aspect.

And still I did not move. Captain Giles lost his patience a little. With an angry puff at his pipe he turned his back on my hesitation.

But it was not hesitation on my part. I had been, if I may express myself so, put out of gear mentally. But as soon as I had convinced myself that this stale, unprofitable world of my dis-content contained such a thing as a command to be seized, I recovered my powers of locomotion.

It’s a good step from the Officers’ Home to the Harbour Office; but with the magic word “Command” in my head I found myself suddenly on the quay as if transported there in the twinkling of an eye, before a portal of dressed white stone above a flight of shallow white steps.

All this seemed to glide toward me swiftly. The whole great roadstead to the right was just a mere flicker of blue, and the dim cool hall swallowed me up out of the heat and glare of which I had not been aware till the very moment I passed in from it.

The broad inner staircase insinuated itself under my feet somehow. Command is a strong magic. The first human beings I perceived distinctly since I had parted with the indignant back of Captain Giles were the crew of the harbour steam-launch lounging on the spacious landing about the curtained archway of the shipping office.