Bellair could credit that. McArliss interested him--an abrupt, nervous man, who covered the eager warmth of his friendliness in frosted mannerisms and sentences clipped at each end. He was afraid of himself except in his work, afraid of his opinions, though a great reader of the queer out of the way good things. Bellair found Woolman’s Life in his little library, with narratives of the ocean, tales of Blackbirders and famous Indiamen, Lytton’s “Strange Story” and “Zanoni,” also Hartmann’s “Magic, Black and White.” The latter he read, and found it not at all what he expected, but a book that would go with him as far as he cared at any angle, and then lose him. He was quite astonished. It was a long book, too--the kind you vow you will begin again, from time to time through the last half. He wanted to talk to McArliss about it, but the Captain was embarrassed. “Crazy, eh?” he would say with a queer, dry laugh. “I’ve stopped saying that about a book--because I don’t get it all,” Bellair remarked. “This man is right as far as I can go with him.” “You give him the benefit--eh? That’s pretty good.” “And you like it?” “Ha--it passes the time. Good God--we have to pass the time!” He spoke jerkily, always in this fashion, and the days brought no ease to the tension. McArliss patted his pockets, swore hastily over little things, looked snappily here and there. Bellair would have guessed, without the word from Stackhouse. The Captain was fighting hard. There seemed nothing to be done; the man had grown a spiked hedge around an innocent shyness; all that was real about him he kept shamefacedly to himself. Still Bellair believed more and more in his fine quality. McArliss made a picture for him of one who has come up through steam and returned to canvas bringing a finer appreciation to the beauty and possibilities of natural seamanship; as a man returns to the land, after many wearing years of city life, with a different and deeper instinct of the nature of the soil. “She’s a slashing sailer,” he would say critically, as he crowded the _Jade_. “She balances to a hair--eh? Good old girl--they don’t breed her kind any more.”