The pain which this parting caused him had something of pleasure in it. There are some men and many women who doubt love unless it bring actual pain with it. Luke had always mistrusted fate, and had love brought happiness with it he would probably have doubted its genuineness. He hugged all his doubts, his jealousies, his passionate thoughts to himself. He had nothing to cling to. Agatha had never told him that she loved him. But she was for him so entirely apart from all other women that it seemed necessary that he also should not be as other men for her. Not much for a lover to live upon during four or five months! Agatha had given him a photograph of herself--a fashionable picture in an affected pose in evening dress--but she had absolutely refused to write. This photograph Luke put into a frame, and as soon as the Croonah was out of dock he hung it up in his little cabin. His servant saw it and recognised the fair passenger of a former voyage, but he knew his place and his master too well to offer any comment. Unlike the ordinary young man, whose thoughts are lightly turned to love, Luke was no worse a sailor for his self-absorption. All his care, all his keen, fearless judgment were required; for the Croonah ran through a misty channel into a boisterous Atlantic. He stood motionless at his post, as was his wont, keen and alert for the moment, but living in the past. He saw again Mrs. Harrington's drawing-room as he had last seen it, with Agatha sitting in a low chair near the fire, while Mrs. Harrington wrote at her desk, and Mrs. Ingham-Baker read the Times. "I have come," he remembered saying, "to bid you good-bye." He heard again the rustle of Mrs. Ingham-Baker's newspaper, and again he saw the look in Agatha's eyes as they met his. He would remember that look to the end of his life; he was living on it now. Agatha, in her rather high-pitched society tones, was the first to speak. "If I were a sailor," she said, "I would never say good-bye. It is better to drop in and pay a call; at the end one might casually mention the words." "Oh! we grow accustomed to it," Luke answered. "Do you?" the girl inquired, with an enigmatical smile, and her answer was in his eyes. She did not want him to grow accustomed to saying farewell to her. Luke FitzHenry was not inclined to sociability--the stronger sort of man rarely is. On board the Croonah he was usually considered morose and self absorbed. He did his duty, and in this was second to no man on board; but he was content to get the passengers to their destination, looking upon the Croonah as a mere conveyance for a certain number of chattering, gossiping, mischief-making live-stock. He utterly failed in his social duties; he did not cultivate the art of making his ship a sort of floating "hydro".