They sailed on, and doused the binnacle lamp and steered by the stars. Nathaniel found that he could hold course by keeping Spica in Virgo, between the mainmast and the shroud on the starboard side. It pleased him to not rely on an instrument for direction, and it exhilarated him to know that he was farther offshore than he had ever been. He only wished he were even farther, away out where the great ships went on their errands of war and commerce. With Will along to help with navigation, he was sure he could handle most anything the ocean had a mind to throw his way. His belief in a just and caring God—a belief as yet untried by a loved one’s death, by crippling disease, by crushing failure, by hunger, poverty, or by any of the countless ordeals and afflictions employed by the eye of heaven to test one’s faith—was the mother of his belief in himself, another faith that had yet to be tried. The spell of self-doubt that nagged him after his father had put him in charge of the ship and his brothers was too minor to count as a trial, and he was fully recovered from it now, restored to the Nathaniel who was captain of the boxing team and the junior varsity football squad, the Nathaniel who had won so many ribbons in sailboat races that he regarded it as an upset in the natural order of things when he didn’t take first place. Of the three kinds of confidence—that of experience, of stupidity, and of ignorance—his was the third, which is to say that it was the confidence of a strong, healthy, athletic, good-looking son of a prosperous family, whose experience of life was confined to Back Bay Boston, summer resorts, and a prep-school campus. He suffered from the delusion of immortality common to all young people (except those who have lost it in wars or disasters), but the congenial circumstances of his life had also put a blind spot in his imagination. He could not conceive of anything bad happening to him, simply because nothing ever had. There was, however, a bright patch in his otherwise unenlightened state. Ignorance, in contrast to stupidity, is not invincible; it can be overcome by education.