Captain Dunsack frowned at the trivial character of these memories. He muttered something about the weight of the Lord, and the carnal hearts of the men in ships. Jeremy declared, "Stuff! He'll wink at a sailor man with hardly a free day on shore. It wasn't bad at Calcutta, either, with an awning on the quarter-deck, watching the carriages and syces in the Maidan and maybe a corpse or two floating about the gangway from the burning ghauts." "A mean entrance," Barzil Dunsack asserted. "I don't know a worse with the southwest monsoon in the Bay of Bengal and the pilot brigs gone from the Sand Heads. That's where Heard got pounded with the _Emerald_ drawing nineteen feet, and eighteen on the bar. Shook the reefs out of his topsails, laid her on her beam ends, and with some inches saved scraped in." "Pick up the three Juggernaut Pagodas of Ganjam," Jeremy remarked absently. "'Thou shalt have no other God--'" Jeremy, with a glint in his eye, asked, "Wasn't your last consignment of West India molasses marked Medford?" "You always were a scoffer," the other replied, unmoved. "How's Nettie?" Jeremy Ammidon inquired with a deliberate show of interest. Barzil's lips tightened. "I haven't seen her for a little," he replied. "She's been visiting at Ipswich." Jeremy added, "A good girl," but the man in bed made no further comment. His undimmed gaze was fastened upon a wall, his mouth folded in a hard line on a harsh and deeply seamed countenance. An able man pursued by bad luck. "Nothing's been heard from Gerrit," Jeremy said after a little. Still the other kept silent. His face darkened: by God, if Barzil hadn't a decent word for the fact that Gerrit was seven months overdue, perhaps lost, this was not a house for him. "I say that we've had nothing from my son since he lay in the Lye-ee-Moon Pass off Hong Kong," he repeated sharply. A spasm of suffering, instantly controlled, passed over Barzil's face. "Gerrit called once and again before he last sailed for Montevideo," he finally pronounced. "I stopped it and he left in a temper. I--I won't have another mortal sin here like Kate's." "Do you mean that Gerrit's loose?" Jeremy hotly demanded, rising. "A more honorable boy never breathed." Barzil was cold. "I told him not to come back," he repeated; "it would only lead to--to shamefulness." Jeremy shook his cane toward the bed. "I may be a scoffer," he cried, "but I wouldn't hold a judgment over a child of mine! I'm not so damned holy that I can look down on a misfortunate girl. If Gerrit did come to see Nettie and the boy had a liking for her, why you drove away a cursed good husband. And if you think for a minute I wouldn't welcome her because that Vollar fell off a yard before he could find a preacher you're an old fool!" "Nettie must bear her burden: far better be dead than a stumbling block."