As the days went by, Captain Bradley found himself depending more and more on the new young strength. The two were inseparable; they seemed to meet on common ground. Captain Bradley was one of those men who never lose their youthful outlook; while the boy was in reality older than his years. When the time came to sail on another voyage, Frankie insisted on leaving school and going away with his father. For the next eighteen months they lived together on the ship, at sea and in foreign ports, and their intimacy grew profound. They talked, read aloud in the evenings, studied navigation and history, discussed the mysteries of life and love; side by side they stood on the quarter-deck through storm and fair weather, and Frankie learned the lore of seamanship at the hands of a past-master. Gradually, Captain Bradley got back his grip on life. The boy had renewed his courage. He even began to dream of the future again—of marriage and a career for Frankie, no following the sea, but a safe career ashore. Then another long voyage, alone this time, for Frankie had entered college to tackle his education in earnest. He had decided to become a civil engineer. This voyage was in many ways a hard one for Captain Bradley. Business was poor; he had a great deal of trouble with his crew, for only the outcasts of society could now be induced to enter the forecastle of a sailing ship; a succession of storms followed him, and at last he lost a foretopmast off the coast of Luzon. He had to face the fact that the _Viking_ was growing old; for several years he had been acutely aware that her top-hamper needed extensive overhauling. As for himself, he knew too well that he had turned the corner of life. The voyage dragged on to its close. He reached the Atlantic Coast in the dead of winter. Three weeks of threshing around outside in the teeth of northeast snowstorms and icy northwesters completed the disheartenment. But at length ship and man, ice-bound and weary, passed in by Sandy Hook and made a harbour once more. The news that met Captain Bradley seemed too heavy to be borne. A month before his arrival, when the _Viking_ had been somewhere off the Windward Islands, running up in the northeast trades, his son, skating on the river beside the college, had fallen through the ice and been drowned. *IV*