“When I got home I let them know I was a widower, married while I was away. Of course they understood she had been drownded on the ship. I wore a black band on my arm for a time. Seein’ as there as warn’t no suspicions in the wind, ‘I’ll make a full job of it,’ I says to myself. ‘I’ll set up a stone in the burial lot to her memory’. And that’s what I did. Wall, they come to write the inscription; I told them the words, but when they asked me for the name, I said kind o’ flustered like, ‘Selima’. It was the first one that popped into my head. That’s all.” The captain smiled, turning his gaze into the fire.
“Then you weren’t ever in love?” I said, with the faintest inflection in my voice.
The captain blew out a great puff of smoke, looked at me over the top of his glasses, and smiled.
MYLES WHITING.
Portfolio
Beauty
I.
Beauty! thy name were counted less than dust
That warriors’ tombs with sullen grace enfold,