THE hard thing was to get Honolulu behind. The first seven days at sea was like a voyage to another planet. Bellair could lose himself in the universe, between the banging of the Chinese gongs that called passengers willingly, for the most part, to meals on the British ship _Suwarrow_.... They had crawled out of the harbour in the dusk, a southwest wind waiting at the gate, like an eager lover for a maiden to steal forth. She was in his arms shamelessly, before the dusk closed, the voices from the land hardly yet having died away. Bellair watched their meeting in the offing. The blusterer came head on; the _Suwarrow_ veered coquettishly and started to run, knowing him the swifter and the stronger, as all woman-things love to know. Presently he had her, and they made a night of it--the moon breaking out aghast from time to time, above black and flying garments of cloud. Bellair enjoyed the game, the funnels smoking the upper decks straight forward. They were making a passage that night, in the southward lift of that lover. He had found a little leaf of cigars in a German shop in Honolulu; the same reminding him of Stackhouse. They were _Brills_, with a Trichinopoli flavour, a wrapping from the States, the main filler doubtless from the Island plantations. The German had talked of them long, playing with the clotty little fellows in his hands, for they were moist enough, not easily to be broken. “You sink your teeth in one of these after a good dinner,” he said, “and if you do not enjoy tobacco, it is because you have been smoking other plants. These are made by a workman----” Bellair smoked to the workman; also he smoked to Stackhouse. Something kindly had come over him for the Animal. Lot & Company had helped him to it.... Yes, he thought, the animal part is right enough. It is only when the human adult consciousness turns predatory that the earth is laid waste and the stars are fogged.... These were but back-flips of Bellair’s mind. In the main he was held so furiously ahead, that body and brain ached with the strain. As nearly as he could describe from the sensation, there was a carbon-stick upstanding between his diaphragm and his throat. Every time he thought of Auckland, it turned hot.