He was not all unhappy now; the work which he had been allowed to resume occupied him sufficiently to distract his memories, and, for the rest, he had fallen easily into his duties. Moreover, he was better situated than he might have hoped to be. Their Lordships had made no objection to his being borne on the books of the _Mignonne_ after hearing her captain's story of the man's innocence, more especially as that captain was one whose destiny seemed of great promise; and so Granger had gone on board the frigate ere she sailed from the Thames. Though that was months ago now--months spent, as told above, in scouring the seas, in hardships, and sometimes disaster. But, during those months, an accident had placed Lewis Granger in an even better position than that which he had at first assumed. The master-gunner had been killed in a conflict between the _Mignonne_ and a French corvette, which the former was chasing, and Granger had stepped into his shoes. And, though such promotion was not much to one who had once worn the uniform of a commissioned officer, yet it was something. It gave him a cabin to himself where he could brood and meditate--as he did too often!--it enabled him to take his meals alone and be alone. And so, with his various duties, his charge of the ordnance and ordnance stores, his long hours devoted to the instruction of the raw hands who as yet scarcely understood the gunnery exercises, and a thousand other matters, he passed those months away. Passed them thus--and in forgetting, or, rather, in striving to forget. For he could not forget. That was the curse laid on him and beneath which he had to bow. "If I could do that," he would say to himself, again and again; and most often when he lay awake for hours in his berth--"if I could do that. If, at last, her sweet, innocent face, her braided chestnut hair, the look of love that never failed to greet me as I drew near, might vanish for ever from my memory! If, too, I could think that she also forgets--then--some day, I might obtain peace. But--I know it!--she no more forgets than I." Stubbornly, doggedly, as it ever is when a man wrestles with himself, so he wrestled now. And it was all of no avail. It was useless! But one woman had ever dawned a star above his existence; the woman who--star-like!--had fallen away from him for ever. "Such love should never have been," he would continue musing, "never have been, or, coming into my life, should have stayed always with me. Other men knew better what to do than I--could fool women, for a pastime, into loving them, could lead them on to madness and then grow weary and fling them contemptuously aside. And I despised such men. Do I despise them now?" But only a moment later he would find his own answer to his own question, and would whisper to himself, "Yes. Even as it is, ours was the fonder, better love."