While he caressed her two small hands between his, he noticed that she was looking at his left hand. “You are looking at the anchor,” he said. “It’s true that it is not handsome. And it won’t come off.” She took his hand and surveyed inquisitively the blue dots that formed an anchor. But she said nothing. “It was in Hamburg that was done,” he said. “I was a ship’s boy on a vessel. We had come ashore and gone into a tavern by the harbor. I remember it all so well: the fog, the many masts in the harbor, and the smell of the grease. My comrades were tattooed, on the hands, arms and body, and they thought I ought to have myself tattooed also. I couldn’t refuse, or they would have thought I was afraid of the pain, for it hurt a great deal. But I thought, too, it was stylish; I was hardly fourteen, you know.” “Are you tattooed on the body as well?” she asked. Smilingly and somewhat unwillingly he answered, “Yes, I have on the breast a ship and a bird, which is supposed to be an eagle, though it’s more like a rooster.” She looked long into his eyes, then slowly raised his hand to her lips and kissed the blue anchor. III Years passed, and one day Richard Fant said to his wife as they were dressing to go out to dinner, “Do you know, I think the blue anchor is beginning to fade. Perhaps it’s on the way to vanish entirely.” “Oh, it’s not as bad as that,” she answered. In reality her thoughts were in another direction. She was thinking of her cousin, Tom Gabel, who was an attaché at the embassy in Madrid. He had now been home for two months on a visit and had promised to come and fetch them so as to go together to the dinner. “Hurry up,” she said, “so that Tom won’t have to wait for you.” “I’m all ready,” he replied. He had sat down in a corner in the shadow, fully dressed. She turned and scanned his attire. “You’ve forgotten your decoration,” she remarked. “I don’t want my decoration,” he responded. “But Richard! could you be so discourteous to Tom, who got it for you?” He went after his decoration. It was not one of the very worst, not an order of Christus or a Nichan Iftikar; it was a medium good decoration, a quite nice decoration. He fastened it on the lapel of his coat with the feeling that perhaps he really needed it, seeing that he had a blue anchor on his left hand. IV There was a dance after the dinner, but Fant remained sitting in a sofa corner of the smoking-room. By his side sat the man whom he had formerly annoyed by staring at his foreign decoration, but he was now a Knight Commander. They had become good friends and called each other by their first names when they said anything to each other, but they said nothing. They merely sat each in his corner of the sofa and smoked big cigars with labels and understood each other perfectly. The doctors had forbidden Fant to smoke strong cigars, because he had a bad heart. But he had just lighted the third since dinner.