On the following night, the Sailor put once more to sea. But it was very different faring from any he had known before. A craft of this kind was another new world to him. Indeed, so little did it resemble the _Margaret Carey_, that it was hard to realize at first that he was once more ocean bound. Even the tang of salt in the air and the wash of the waves against the sides of the great ship were scarcely enough to assure him that he was again afloat. It was the presence of Klondyke which really convinced him. "I never thought we should come to this," said his friend as they lingered in boiled shirts over an excellent dinner and a band the second day out. "It's better than having to turn out on deck at eight bells with your oilskins soaked and the nose of the Horn in front of you. You think so, Sailor, I know." Henry Harper confessed that he did. "How you stuck it all those years, I can't think," said Klondyke. "How any chap sticks it who doesn't really take to the sea passes me. But you were always a nailer for keeping on keeping on." The case might be even as Klondyke said, but the Sailor had about reached his limit. Klondyke himself, who was not a close observer, was struck by the change. He couldn't quite make him out. In his peculiar way, he had a great regard for the Sailor. He considered him to be a white man all through; and knowing so much of the facts of his life, he felt his grit was quite extraordinary. But now it had begun to seem that this gallant fighter was losing tenacity. There was something about him which suggested a boxer who has been knocked to the boards, who is trying to rise before he is counted out and sickly realizes that he can't. What had happened? It was clear that he had had an awful facer. How had he come by it? Klondyke belonged to a type which strictly preferred its own business to that of anyone else, but it was impossible not to ask these questions, knowing as much of Henry Harper as he did. Was Mary the cause? Had the blow been dealt by her? Somehow, he did not think that could be the case. And yet there was a doubt in his mind. He knew, at least, that Mary was fearfully upset. It was she who had come to him with a particular look in her eyes and had proposed a voyage for the Sailor on the plea that he had been working too hard. That certainly did not suggest any unkindness on her part. All the same, he knew that his family strongly disapproved of her intimacy with Henry Harper. Putting two and two together, he was half inclined to believe that the Sailor had proposed to Mary, and that against her own wish she had refused him. But even that hypothesis did not account for the morbid and rudderless state he was in now.