that I have hid his very name from those two creatures that I love!” 

 “Ay, ay,” said Le Farge, “it’s sad! it’s sad!” 

 “When I was quite a child,” went on Lestrange, “a child no older than Dicky, my nurse used to terrify me with tales about dead people. I was told I’d go to hell when I died if I wasn’t a good child. I cannot tell you how much that has poisoned my life, for the thoughts we think in childhood, Captain, are the fathers of the thoughts we think when we are grown up. And can a diseased father—have healthy children?” 

 “I guess not.” 

 “So I just said, when these two tiny creatures came into my care, that I would do all in my power to protect them from the terrors of life—or rather, I should say, from the terror of death. I don’t know whether I have done right, but I have done it for the best. They had a cat, and one day Dicky came in to me and said: ‘Father, pussy’s in the garden asleep, and I can’t wake her.’ So I just took him out for a walk; there was a circus in the town, and I took him to it. It so filled his mind that he quite forgot the cat. Next day he asked for her. I did not tell him she was buried in the garden, I just said she must have run away. In a week he had forgotten all about her—children soon forget.” 

 “Ay, that’s true,” said the sea captain. “But ’pears to me they must learn some time they’ve got to die.” 

 “Should I pay the penalty before we reach land, and be cast into that great, vast sea, I would not wish the children’s dreams to be haunted by the thought: just tell them I’ve gone on board another ship. You will take them back to Boston; I have here, in a letter, the name of a lady who will care for them. Dicky will be well off, as far as worldly goods are concerned, and so will Emmeline. Just tell them I’ve gone on board another ship—children soon forget.” 

 “I’ll do what you ask,” said the seaman. 

 The moon was over the horizon now, and the Northumberland lay adrift in a river of silver. Every spar was distinct, every reef point on the great sails, and the decks lay like spaces of frost cut by shadows black as ebony. 

 As the two men sat without speaking, thinking their own thoughts, a little white figure emerged from the saloon hatch. It was Emmeline. She was a professed sleepwalker—a past mistress of the art. 

 Scarcely had she stepped into dreamland than she had lost her precious box, and now she 

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