'What should there be in this thing, nurse, to dispirit your husband after all these days, now that the man has as good as sworn that he was mistaken?'
'Why, my dear, he is an Irishman, and they are a superstitious people.'
'The crew no longer trouble themselves about that ghost.'
'I don't think they do. The boatswain,' said she, laughing, 'told my husband a man had said that as the ghost appeared with a wet face it must have been Old Stormy.'
'Who's Old Stormy?' said I.
'Oh,' she answered, still laughing, 'there is a well-known windlass song called "Old Stormy, he is dead and gone!"'
'Old Stormy wouldn't be like Captain Burke,' said I.
'And that should satisfy him,' she answered. 'I doubt that he's quite the thing. These roasting latitudes use the liver cruelly. Then again there's the anxiety of command. The tone of the mind gets lowered by worry, which a man takes as a matter of routine, and doesn't heed though it's working in him all the same. It'll wear off, I dare say, when the weather gets cold.'
She talked placidly, going on with her work with a comfortable, smiling face. She had married too late in life to take anxious views of her husband. It's the young wife that frets, I think. Not that Mrs. Burke would not have shown herself deeply anxious had her husband been ailing in his health; it was his fancies she took no notice of, a smile was good enough for them.