He watched his father go up toward the house, walking as if he were carrying a seabag: a heaviness in his old nimble sailorman’s gait, a slump to his shoulders—too slight to be noticed by those who didn’t know him well, but obvious to those who did. These changes in stride and posture, like his short-windedness, had come about very recently, appearing simultaneously with changes in his manner: an air of distant preoccupation, pensive silences at the dinner table, and something else that had come to share tenancy with the ferocity that was the hallmark of his temperament. Nathaniel could not give a name to it. A melancholy? A somberness? Maybe there was no single word for that hint of something autumnal, like the first yellowing of September leaves. He acted like a man with a broken heart, sometimes. Not that Nathaniel knew much about broken hearts, beyond what he had read in novels, beyond the disturbing ache that afflicted his own heart whenever he saw Constance Williams in her new Gibson girl hairstyle and the lace-collared blouses that she now filled out in a womanly way. He couldn’t imagine his father with a broken heart, in any case—there were people who would question if the man had one to break.

He sat down to wait and gazed at the schooner, and she affected him the way a beautiful building or landscape affects a lover of architecture or art. There was nothing fancy or exotic about her; her lines were elegant simplicity itself. She was sturdy enough for blue water work, yet she was agile and quick in stays, for a full-keeled vessel, and she gave an impression of lightness and buoyancy, as if she were ribbed with the airy bones of a gull or frigate bird. She had been christened Double Eagle the year before Nathaniel was born. Built in the Story shipyards in Essex as a miniature Gloucesterman, she was forty-six feet overall, thirty-eight on the waterline, and as swift as a vessel that length could be: last year, homeward bound from Canada in a gale, she had topped nine knots. Even at rest, she seemed to be in motion. Nathaniel loved her dark green hull, accented by white sheerstrake, sweeping back like a giant egret feather from the gilded ivy carved in her bow; loved as well the Euclidian shapes her stays and shrouds drew against the sky, the symmetry of her Sitka masts, varnished to a glossy butternut.