Page:MacGrath--The luck of the Irish.djvu/119

 There was no earthly way of bridging such a gulf.

Evil and temptation ; the words recurred to him. What had she done? From what had she fled? Who and what was she, after all? That for three years she had been a school-teacher was an established fact. But before that? Was there a husband in the coil somewhere? Evil and temptation.

A fine future for him; and that dream of his about a home of his own, a garden to play in, a wife and a couple of kids, was dissipating like that streamer of fog off the port bow.

Up from under these bitter thoughts came the old superstition. He found that he still adhered to the belief that his presence on board here was a calculated move in the checker-game of fate. Some day she might need him, and when that day came William Grogan would not be found wanting.

Far up in the crow's-nest he saw the dim outline of the lookout. He heard the "All's well!" It startled him. Then his back stiffened. Who could say? That might be a message to him as well as to the man at the wheel above. … Aw, was he going to let those pipe-dreams of his carry him up again, only to slam him down? Not all his philosophy, such as it was, nor the recollection of his buffets and how he had taken them upstanding, nor the knowledge that financially he need no longer worry, sufficed to ease a corner of this dull weight of misery. He had fallen in love with a woman who was not his kind.