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detachment from the forms and colours of this world. It was, as it were, final.
    And yet, suddenly, I recognized Hamilton. I recognized him without effort, without a shock, without a start. There he was, strolling toward the harbour office with his stiff, arrogant dignity. His red face made him noticeable at a distance. It flamed, over there, on the shady side of the street.
    He had perceived me, too. Something (unconscious exuberance of spirits perhaps) moved me to wave my hand to him elaborately. This lapse from good taste happened before I was aware that I was capable of it.
    The impact of my impudence stopped him short, much as a bullet might have done. I verily believe he staggered, though as far as I could see he didn’t actually fall. I had gone past in a moment and did not turn my head. I had forgotten his existence.
    The next ten minutes might have been ten seconds or ten centuries for all my consciousness had to do with it. People might have been falling dead around me, houses crumbling, guns firing, I wouldn’t have known. I was thinking: “By Jove! I have got it.”
It
being the command. It had come about in a way utterly unforeseen in my modest daydreams.
    I perceived that my imagination had been running in conventional channels and that my hopes had always been drab stuff. I had envisaged a command as a result of a slow course of promotion in the employ of some highly respectable firm. The reward of faithful service. Well, faithful service was all right. One would naturally give that for one’s own sake, for the sake of the ship, for the love of the life of one’s choice; not for the sake of the reward.
    There is something distasteful in the notion of a reward.
    And now here I had my command, absolutely in my pocket, in a way undeniable indeed, but most unexpected; beyond my imaginings, outside all reasonable expectations, and even notwithstanding the existence of some sort of obscure intrigue to keep it away from me. It is true that the intrigue was feeble, but it helped the feeling of wonder—as if I had been specially destined for that ship I did not know, by some power higher than the prosaic agencies of the commercial world.
    A strange sense of exultation began to creep into me. If I had worked for that command ten years or more there would have been nothing of the kind. I was a little frightened.
    â€œLet us be calm,” I said to myself.
    Outside the door of the Officers’ Home the wretched steward seemed to be waiting for me. There was a broad flight of a few steps, and he ran to and fro on the top of it as if chained there. A distressed cur. He looked as though his throat were too dry for him to bark.
    I regret to say I stopped before going in. There had been a revolution in my moral nature. He waited open-mouthed, breathless, while I looked at him for half a minute.
    â€œAnd you thought you could keep me out of it,” I said scathingly.
    â€œYou said you were going home,” he squeaked miserably. “You said so. You said so.”
    â€œI wonder what Captain Ellis will have to say to that excuse,” I uttered slowly with a sinister meaning.
    His lower jaw had been trembling all the time and his voice was like the bleating of a sick goat. “You have given me away? You have done for me?”
    Neither his distress nor yet the sheer absurdity of it was able to disarm me. It was the first instance of harm being attempted to be done to me—at any rate, the first I had ever found out. And I was still young enough, still too much on this side of the shadow line, not to be surprised and indignant at such things.
    I gazed at him inflexibly. Let the beggar suffer. He slapped his forehead and I passed in, pursued, into the dining room, by his screech: “I always said you’d be the death of me.”
    This clamour not only overtook me, but went ahead as it were on to the verandah and brought out Captain Giles.
    He stood before me in the doorway in