A knock sounded at the door, and a servant entered with fresh candles, which he proceeded to fix on the dressing stand, the overmantel, and light. The illumination, at first uncertain, wan, gained in steady brightness. It was time to dress for dinner. There had been no opportunity for him to procure mourning, but he put on his darkest, most formal clothes, and tied a severe black neckcloth. The candelabra on the dining table showed his mother’s place to be empty--she was not yet able to manage the casual--and the chair that had been Bartlett’s was pushed against the wall. Ira Calef, seen to extreme advantage at the ceremony of dinner, hardly spoke; he was intent upon his codfish, with a green sauce; and he tasted critically the brown sherry before him in a large goblet of fragile glass flecked with gold. With this, it developed, he was dissatisfied; the wine had, he said curtly, withered; sherry, upon opening, could not withstand delay. He sent out the entire decanter with the order to replace it with another bottling--the Tio Pepe of the _Saragon_. He listed his cellar by the names of the vessels in which the various importations had been made. During this process he maintained an inflexible silence colored with his familiar suggestion of a restraint that no immoderate cause could break. To Epes the sherry, when it arrived, had no more warmth or flavor than was probable in the celebrated muddiness of the Hugli River. Selecting a cheroot blindly from the box held at his elbow, and lighting it at the tendered spill, he retired mentally in the thin veil of smoke that rose across his face. “You will, of course, stop in at the Balavans’ this evening,” his father said presently. Everything he uttered, Epes thought, took subconsciously the form of a direction. Still he must, he supposed, see Annice, if only for the announcement of his return. The Balavans lived on the north edge of town, their terraced lawn descended to navigable water--to the anchorage, in fact, of the now vanished Balavan merchant fleet, and a deserted warehouse. And, shown through the hall to a drawing-room against the dark, bare garden, Epes found not Annice, as he had expected, but Sumatra. She was glad to see him. She was an indifferent girl, and this was specially noticeable; but he returned, inwardly and visibly, little if any of her pleasure. “Tell me every shift of the wheel,” she demanded, facing him from the long stool of the spinet. “Be a human log.” “I thought Annice was here,” he replied. “She will be soon enough. Did the _Triton_ do anything really stirring, outsail seven ships or part both chains in Table Bay? I hope you came into Derby Wharf with the sheer poles coach-whipped and cross-pointed Turks’-heads with double-rose props.” “I assure you, Sumatra,” he told her stiffly, “that I haven’t any idea of what you are talking about. And, what is more, I don’t think you have.” With this he half turned from her.