until the man from Hartford came in to ascertain if his locks had been tampered with.
"Hold to the all good!" urged the man at a moment when it was too poignantly, too openly certain that Bean could hold to very little indeed.
"Uh-hah!" gasped Bean.
"Go into the silence," urged the man kindly.
"You go" retorted Bean swiftly; but he should not further be shamed by the recording of language which he lived to regret.
The Hartford man said, "Tut-tut-tut! " and went elsewhere than he had been told to go.
There ensued a dreadful time of alternating night and day, with recurrent visions of the flapper, who perfectly knew and said that he had been eating stuff out of the wrong cans.
"'As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he'," affirmed the Hartford person each morning as he shaved.
And a merry party gathered in the adjoining stateroom of afternoons and sang songs of the jolly sailor's life: "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean," and "Sailing, Sailing Over the Bounding Main."
On the morning of the fourth day he made the momentous discovery that the image of food was not repulsive to all his better instincts. Carefully he got upon his feet and they amazingly supported him. He dressed with but slight discomfort. He would audaciously experiment upon himself with the actual sight of food. It was the luncheon hour.
