When on his return he landed on the quay again Venus, like a choice jewel set low on the hem of the sky, cast a faint gold trail behind him upon the roadstead, as level as a floor made of one dark and polished stone.  The lofty vaults of the avenues were black—­all black overhead—­and the porcelain globes on the lamp-posts resembled egg-shaped pearls, gigantic and luminous, displayed in a row whose farther end seemed to sink in the distance, down to the level of his knees.  He put his hands behind his back.  He would now consider calmly the discretion of it before saying the final word to-morrow.  His feet scrunched the gravel loudly—­the discretion of it.  It would have been easier to appraise had there been a workable alternative.  The honesty of it was indubitable:  he meant well by the fellow; and periodically his shadow leaped up intense by his side on the trunks of the trees, to lengthen itself, oblique and dim, far over the grass—­repeating his stride.

The discretion of it.  Was there a choice?  He seemed already to have lost something of himself; to have given up to a hungry specter something of his truth and dignity in order to live.  But his life was necessary.  Let poverty do its worst in exacting its toll of humiliation.  It was certain that Ned Eliott had rendered him, without knowing it, a service for which it would have been impossible to ask.  He hoped Ned would not think there had been something underhand in his action.  He supposed that now when he heard of it he would understand—­or perhaps he would only think Whalley an eccentric old fool.  What would have been the good of telling him—­any more than of blurting the whole tale to that man Massy?  Five hundred pounds ready to invest.  Let him make the best of that.  Let him wonder.  You want a captain—­I want a ship.  That’s enough.  B-r-r-r-r.  What a disagreeable impression that empty, dark, echoing steamer had made upon him. . . .

A laid-up steamer was a dead thing and no mistake; a sailing-ship somehow seems always ready to spring into life with the breath of the incorruptible heaven; but a teamer, thought Captain Whalley, with her fires out, without the warm whiffs from below meeting you on her decks, without the hiss of steam, the clangs of iron in her breast—­lies there as cold and still and pulseless as a corpse.

In the solitude of the avenue, all black above and lighted below, Captain Whalley, considering the discretion of his course, met, as it were incidentally, the thought of death.  He pushed it aside with dislike and contempt.  He almost laughed at it; and in the unquenchable vitality of his age only thought with a kind of exultation how little he needed to keep body and soul together.  Not a bad investment for the poor woman this solid carcass of her father.  And for the rest—­in case of anything—­the agreement should be clear:  the whole five hundred to be paid back to her integrally within three months.  Integrally.  Every penny.  He was not to lose