Captain Charles Margaret, the owner of the _Broken Heart_, sitting there in his chair, in the quiet cabin, was not yet forty; but his brown hair was grizzled, and his handsome face, so grave, so full of dignity, was marked austerely with lines. He gave one, at first, the impression of a man who had lived fully, grandly, upon many sides of life; with a nobility inherent, not to be imitated. It was only after long months of friendship that the observer could learn the man’s real nature. He would see then that the real nature, ripened, as it was, on so many sides, ready, as it was, to blossom wonderfully, had never come to flower, still less to fruit. It was a great nature, checked by some hunger of the soul, which (this is the sorrow of all beautiful desire) would perhaps have destroyed the soul, had it been satisfied. He was one who had loved for many years. He had paid away all the gold of his life, for a sorrow and a few copper memories. He had loved nobly, like a man of the heroic time, letting life go by him with a smile, so long as the woman whom he loved might be spared one little moment’s annoyance, one little wrinkling of the beautiful brow. He had said to himself that he had worn this woman’s glove, and that he would wear no other woman’s petticoat. And from long brooding on this wayward beauty who had spoiled his life, he had learned much of women. He understood them emotionally with a clearness which sometimes frightened him. He felt that he took a base advantage of them in allowing them to talk to him. Their hearts were open books to him. Though the woman said, “Look on this page, or on this,” his instinct, never wrong, revealed to him the page she tried to hide; and his indulgence of this sense made him, at times, of little use in conversation; for the revealed truth amused him more than its polite screen. At times its possession saddened him, for he knew that he would never exercise that sense in the tenderness of the accepted lover, reading the unspoken thought in the beloved eyes. In his person he was tall and finely built, but a certain clumsiness in his walk made his appearance ungraceful when he left his chair. His hands were singularly beautiful. His eyes were grey and deep-set. His face was pale, inclining to sallow, but bronzed by the wind and sun. He was careful, but quiet in his dress. He wore a black suit, precisely cut, like the clothes of a Puritan, but for its fine lace collar and elaborately carved buttons of scarlet ivory.