I came back and sat down. I was rather astonished at my own coolness. “Kitty Melrose was the most charming girl I ever knew,” I remarked. “Clean and fine and upstanding and willful and witching.” Gorham suddenly brought his great palm down on the chair arm with a mighty smack. “Of course. We both knew her. Half of us were in love with her. She never looked at any of us. She was at once our best of friends and yet aloof. And of us all but one man touched that secret spot which lies in every woman’s heart--and he went and married the McTodd girl. Nice enough, probably, and all that; but not in Harry Owen’s class nor in Kitty Melrose’s set. And Harry Owen threw away the _Shearwater_ for Kitty’s sake.” “But he hadn’t met her in years,” I persisted. “Of course not!” Gorham retorted. “He was in love with her. He didn’t even dare think of her. He had tied himself up tight and fast to Sheila. You remember his marriage?” “I was on the China coast at the time,” I growled. “I heard some queer things--which I didn’t believe.” “Right!” was his answer. “But we’re going to get this thing straight. The world has forgotten the wreck of the _Shearwater_ and the mystery of it. But you and I were Harry’s friends. We were Kitty’s friends. And for the sake of the two of them I’m going to tell you the truth to-night. Then we are never going to whisper so much as a word all the rest of our lives. Some people would misunderstand.” He lighted his pipe deliberately and stared into the grate a moment. Gorham is noted in many ports for his mumness, his almost savage insistence on plain facts, his steady judgment. And here he was talking of a mystery. I felt the note of unsureness in his voice. “In a case like this,” he began, “I want to go back a little and fix the facts we both know, as a sort of starting point. In the first place, Harry Owen was what we call a gentleman, well bred, pretty well educated, sent to sea as a stripling to make a man out of him, as the phrase runs. But one always saw him sooner or later in the old crowd. The nice crowd you and I knew when we were younger. He got his papers easily enough and gossip ran that he was going to stop ashore and be something in the broking line. He spoke to me about it one trip I made on the old _City of Peking_. He thought it would be pretty splendid to be a broker. He was tired of the sea--it was no place for an ambitious man--a dog’s life.