approaching end of his labours.
At the garden-gate of a fair-sized house some half-mile along the road the captain stopped, and after an impatient fumbling at the latch strode up the path, followed by Mr. Wilks, and knocked at the door. As he paused on the step he half turned, and for the first time noticed the facial expression of his faithful follower.
“What the dickens are you looking like that for?” he demanded.
“I've been surprised, sir,” conceded Mr. Wilks; “surprised and astonished.”
Wrath blazed again in the captain's eyes and set lines in his forehead. He was being pitied by a steward!
“You've been drinking,” he said, crisply; “put that bag down.”
“Arsking your pardon, sir,” said the steward, twisting his unusually dry lips into a smile, “but I've 'ad no opportunity, sir—I've been follerin' you all day, sir.”
A servant opened the door. “You've been soaking in it for a month,” declared the captain as he entered the hall. “Why the blazes don't you bring that bag in? Are you so drunk you don't know what you are doing?”
Mr. Wilks picked the bag up and followed humbly into the house. Then he lost his head altogether, and gave some colour to his superior officer's charges by first cannoning into the servant and then wedging the captain firmly in the doorway of the sitting-room with the bag.
“Steward!” rasped the captain.
“Yessir,” said the unhappy Mr. Wilks.
“Go and sit down in the kitchen, and don't leave this house till you're sober.”
Mr. Wilks disappeared. He was not in his first lustre, but he was an ardent admirer of the sex, and in an absent-minded way he passed his arm round the handmaiden's waist, and sustained a buffet which made his head ring.
“A man o' your age, and drunk, too,” explained the damsel.
Mr. Wilks denied both charges. It appeared that he was much younger than he looked, while, as for drink, he had forgotten the taste of it. A question as to the reception Ann would have accorded a boyish teetotaler remained unanswered.
In the sitting-room Mrs. Kingdom, the captain's widowed sister, put down her crochet-work as her brother entered, and turned to him expectantly. There was an expression of loving sympathy on her mild and rather foolish face, and the captain stiffened at once.
“I was in the wrong,” he said, harshly, as he dropped into a chair; “my certificate has been suspended for six months, and my first officer has been commended.”
“Suspended?” gasped Mrs. Kingdom, pushing back the white streamer to the cap which she wore in memory of the late Mr. Kingdom, and sitting upright. “You?”
“I think that's what I said,” replied her brother.
Mrs. Kingdom gazed at him mournfully, and, putting her hand behind her, began a wriggling search in her pocket for a handkerchief, with the idea of paying a wholesome tribute of tears. She was a past-master in the art of grief, and, pending its extraction, a docile tear hung on her eyelid and waited. The captain eyed her preparations with silent anger.
“I am not surprised,” said Mrs. Kingdom, dabbing her eyes; “I expected it somehow. I seemed to have a warning of it. Something seemed to tell me; I couldn't explain, but I seemed to know.”
She sniffed gently, and, wiping one eye at a time, kept the disengaged one charged with sisterly solicitude upon her brother. The captain, with steadily rising anger, endured this game of one-eyed bo-peep for five minutes; then he rose and, muttering strange things in his beard, stalked upstairs to his room.
Mrs. Kingdom, thus forsaken, dried her eyes and resumed her work. The remainder of the family were in the kitchen ministering to the wants of a misunderstood steward, and, in return, extracting information which should render them independent of the captain's version.
“Was it very solemn, Sam?” inquired Miss Nugent, aged nine, who was sitting on the kitchen table.
Mr. Wilks used his hands and eyebrows to indicate the solemnity of the occasion.
“They even made the cap'n leave off speaking,” he said, in an awed voice.
“I should have liked to have been there,” said Master Nugent, dutifully.
“Ann,” said Miss Nugent, “go and draw Sam a jug of beer.”
“Beer, Miss?” said Ann.
“A jug of beer,” repeated Miss Nugent, peremptorily.
Ann took a jug from the dresser, and Mr. Wilks, who was watching her, coughed helplessly. His perturbation attracted the attention of his hostess, and, looking round for the cause, she was just in time to see Ann disappearing into the larder with a cream jug.
“The big jug, Ann,” she said, impatiently; “you ought to know Sam would like a big one.”
Ann changed the jugs, and, ignoring a mild triumph in Mr. Wilks's eye, returned to the larder, whence ensued a musical trickling. Then Miss Nugent, raising the jug with some difficulty, poured out a tumbler for the steward with her own fair hands.
“Sam likes beer,” she said, speaking generally.
“I knew that the first time I see him, Miss,” remarked the vindictive Ann.
Mr. Wilks drained his glass and set it down on the table again, making a feeble gesture of repulse as Miss Nugent refilled it.
“Go on, Sam,” she said, with kindly encouragement; “how much does this jug hold, Jack?”
“Quart,” replied her brother.
“How many quarts are there in a gallon?”
“Four.”
Miss Nugent looked troubled. “I heard father say he drinks gallons a day,” she remarked; “you'd better fill all the jugs, Ann.”
“It was only 'is way o' speaking,” said Mr. Wilks, hurriedly; “the cap'n is like that sometimes.”
“I knew a man once, Miss,” said Ann, “as used to prefer to 'ave it in a wash-hand basin. Odd, ugly-looking man 'e was; like Mr. Wilks in the face, only better-looking.”
Mr. Wilks sat upright and, in the mental struggle involved in taking in this insult in all its ramifications, did not notice until too late that Miss Nugent had filled his glass again.
“It must ha' been nice for the captain to 'ave you with 'im to-day,” remarked Ann, carelessly.
“It
