"'But what was your idea, Fred?' says Jack to me on the road home. He wore habitually a mystified air when we were alone together in his cabin. Jack had become settled in life. His movements had grown more deliberate, and his choleric energy had mellowed into an assured demeanour of authority. You could imagine him the father of a young lady. He sat back in his big chair, motionless save for the cigar turning between thumb and finger, a typical ship-master. He was recognized by the law as competent to perform the functions of a magistrate on the high seas. He no longer plunged like an angry bull into rows with agents. He had arrived at that period of life when all the half-forgotten experiences of our youth, the foolish experiments, the humiliating reverses, come back to our chastened minds and assist us to impose our personalities upon a world ignorant of our former imperfections. And he sat there turning his cigar between thumb and finger, his bright and blood-shot brown eyes fixed in a sort of affectionate glare upon me, his old chum, who had suddenly left him spiritually in the lurch, so to speak. 'What was your idea, Fred? Do you mean to say you hadn't made any plans for the future at all? Just going to let the thing slide?' And the curious thing about his state of mind was that he was attracted by the idea without understanding it. As he sat watching me, mumbling about the future, and the taking of risks and what people at home would say, it was obvious that he was beginning to see the possibilities of such an adventure. He had a vague and nebulous glimpse of something that was neither furtive sensuality nor smug respectability. 'Like something in one of these here novels,' as he put it with unconscious pathos. And that, I suppose, was as near as he ever attained to an understanding of the romantic temperament. It was fine of him, for he got it through a very real friendship. 'I know you wouldn't do anything in the common way, Fred,' he observed after a long contemplation of his cigar. "'And would you have stood for it, Jack?' I asked him, 'seeing that Mrs. Evans would hardly have approved, I mean.' He roused up and worked his shoulders suddenly in a curious way, as though shifting a burden. "'Oh, as to that!' he broke out, and then after a pause he added, 'You can't always go by that. I'd stand for a whole lot from you, Fred.' "And with that, to the regret of Mr. Tonderbeg who was hovering about outside in the main cabin, our conversation ended.