Before she had been quite an hour at rest, a meagre little man, with a red-tipped nose and a face cast in an angry mould, landed from a sampan on the quay of the Foreign Concession, and incontinently turned to shake his fist at her,

A tall individual, with legs much too thin for a rotund stomach, and with watery eyes, strolled up and remarked, ‘Just left her—eh? Quick work.’

He wore a soiled suit of blue flannel with a pair of dirty cricketing shoes; a dingy grey moustache drooped from his lip, and daylight could be seen in two places between the rim and the crown of his hat.

‘Hallo! what are you doing here?’ asked the ex-second-mate of the Nan-Shan, shaking hands hurriedly.

‘Standing by for a job—chance worth taking—got a quiet hint,’ explained the man with the broken hat, in jerky, apathetic wheezes.

The second shook his fist again at the Nan-Shan. ‘There’s a fellow there that ain’t fit to have the command of a scow,’ he declared, quivering with passion, while the other looked about listlessly.

‘Is there?’

But he caught sight on the quay of a heavy seaman’s chest, painted brown under a fringed sailcloth cover, and lashed with new manila line. He eyed it with awakened interest.

‘I would talk and raise trouble if it wasn’t for that damned Siamese flag. Nobody to go to—or I would make it hot for him. The fraud! Told his chief engineer—that’s another fraud for you—I had lost my nerve. The greatest lot of ignorant fools that ever sailed the seas. No! You can’t think …’

‘Got your money all right?’ enquired his seedy acquaintance suddenly.

‘Yes. Paid me off on board,’ raged the second mate. “‘Get your breakfast on shore,” says he.’

‘Mean skunk!’ commented the tall man vaguely, and passed his tongue on his lips. ‘What about having a drink of some sort?’

‘He struck me,’ hissed the second mate.

‘No! Struck! You don’t say?’ The man in blue began to bustle about sympathetically. ‘Can’t possibly talk here. I want to know all about it. Struck—eh? Let’s get a fellow to carry your chest. I know a quiet place where they have some bottled beer …’

Mr Jukes, who had been scanning the shore through a pair of glasses, informed the chief engineer afterwards that ‘our late second mate hasn’t been long in finding a friend. A chap looking uncommonly like a bummer. I saw them walk away together from the quay.’

The hammering and banging of the needful repairs did not disturb Captain MacWhirr. The steward found in the letter he wrote, in a tidy chart-room, passages of such absorbing interest that twice he was nearly caught in the act. But Mrs MacWhirr, in the drawing-room of the forty-pound house, stifled a yawn—perhaps out of self-respect—for she was alone.

She reclined in a plush-bottomed and gilt hammock-chair near a tiled fireplace, with Japanese fans on the mantel and a glow of coals in the grate. Lifting her hands, she glanced wearily here and there into the many pages. It was not her fault they were so prosy, so completely uninteresting—from ‘My darling wife’ at the beginning, to ‘Your loving husband’ at the end. She couldn’t be really expected to understand all these ship affairs. She was glad, of course, to hear from him, but she had never asked herself why, precisely.