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256 stared downward as if through the floor shadows he saw into the deep void of the past.

"Don't think I could 'a' stood ever seein' St. Thomas again after that"—

He was thinking of the only voyage his wife had made with him, and of Eunice, their only child. With solemn inward vision, evoked by the touch of a lank worsted doll, he recalled the sultry nights of watching and heartbreak in this very cabin, the flush of the fever in the child's cheeks, the gleaming disorder of her bright hair on the pillow, the glare of tropic sun on a white-hot deck, their silent group at the rail, the trembling of a little black book, the lofty words of consolation, so hard to read aloud, so much harder to believe when that frail object, intolerably precious, was committed to the unstirring, blank, august emptiness of ocean. "Zing, I can't bear to sell her," whispered the old man. Fumbling as if blind, he put away the doll in a breast pocket. "I can't bear to."

Zwinglius cleared his throat, said nothing, shifted his boots. In a heavy silence that