"That's the Minnehaha," said the second mate. "She belongs to the
beautiful heiress, Miss Fenacre!"
"Ready for a Mediterranean cruise," said the purser, who had been
reading one of the newspapers the pilot had brought aboard.
Frank heard these two remarks in silence. The sun, to him, seemed
to stop shining. The morning that had been so bright and pleasant
all at once overcame him with disgust. The might-have-been took
him by the throat. He descended into the engine-room to hide his
dejected face in the heated oily atmosphere below; and seating
himself on a tool-chest he watched, with hardly seeing eyes, the
ponderous movement of his machinery.
It was the anodyne for his troubles, to feel the vibration of the
engines and hear the rumble and hiss of the jacketed cylinders. It
always comforted him; he found companionship in the mighty thing
he controlled; he looked at the trembling needle in the gauge, and
instinctively noted the pressure as he thought of the trim smart
vessel at anchor and of his dear one on the eve of parting. He
wondered whether they would ever pass again, he and she, in all
the years to come.
The thought of the yacht haunted him all that day. He took a
sudden revulsion against the grinding routine of his own life. It
came over him like a new discovery, that he was tired of South
America, tired of his ship, tired of everything. He contrasted his
own voyages in and out, from the same place to the same place, up
and down, up and down, as regular as the swing of a pendulum with
that gay wanderer of the raking masts who was free to roam the
world.
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