"I didn't want to bring it up before his brother," said Knight, "they are a sensitive folk; but the last sentence was to the effect that the _Evening Star_ had now been claimed by the spirit of Captain Dayrell, and that the writer respectfully begged to commit _hari kari_." Our road turned inland here, and I looked back toward the fishing village. The night was falling, but the sea was lilac-colored with the afterglow. I could see the hut and the little birdhouse black against the water. On a sand dune just beyond them, the figures of the fisherman Kato and his wife were sitting on their heels, and still watching us. They must have been nearly a mile away by this time; but in that clear air they were carved out sharp and black as tiny ebony images against the fading light of the Pacific. VII GOBLIN PEACHES The big liner was running like a ghost, with all lights out on deck and every porthole shrouded. This might seem to the layman almost humorously inconsistent; for, every minute or two the blast of her foghorn went bellowing away into the night, loudly enough to disturb the slumbers of any U-boat lying "doggo" within five miles. Duncan Drew and I were alone in the smoking-room when the steward brought us our coffee. There were very few passengers; and the first cabin-folk were curiously different from those of peace-time. Most of them, I fancied, were crossing the Atlantic on some business directly connected with the war. There was a Belgian professor from Louvain, for instance, who was taking his family over to the new post that had been found for him at an American University; and there was the wife of an Italian statesman, an American woman, who was returning home to raise funds for the Red Cross of her adopted country. There were others whom it was not so easy to place; and Duncan Drew would have been among them, I think, if I had not known him. Nobody could have looked more like a civilian and less like an officer of the British Navy than Duncan did at this moment. But I knew the job on which he was engaged. When he found that I knew the Maine coast, he asked me to help him in a certain matter.