Salthaven

Captain Trimblett still fidgeted. "Well, it's your house," he said at last. "If you don't mind that lanky son of a gun making free, I suppose it's no business of mine. If he made that noise aboard my ship—"

Red of face he marched to the window and stood looking out. Fortified by his presence, Hartley rang the bell.

"Is there anybody in the kitchen?" he inquired, as Rosa answered it. "I fancied I heard a man's voice."

"The milkman was here just now," said Rosa, and, eying him calmly, departed.

The captain swung round in wrathful amazement.

"By—," he spluttered; "I've seen—well—by—b-r-r-r– Can I ring for that d–d bo'sun o' mine?

"Certainly," said Hartley.

The captain crossed to the fireplace and, seizing the bell-handle, gave a pull that made the kitchen resound with wild music. After a decent interval, apparently devoted to the allaying of masculine fears, Rosa appeared again.

"Did you ring, sir?" she inquired, gazing at her master.

"Send that bo'sun o' mine here at once!" said the captain, gruffly.

Rosa permitted herself a slight expression of surprise. "Bo'sun, sir?" she asked, politely.

"Yes."

The girl affected to think. "Oh, you mean Mr. Walters?" she said, at last.

"Send him here," said the captain.

Rosa retired slowly, and shortly afterward something was heard brushing softly against the wall of the passage. It ceased for a time, and just as the captain's patience was nearly at an end there was a sharp exclamation, and Mr. Walters burst suddenly into the room and looked threateningly over his shoulder at somebody in the passage.

"What are you doing here?" demanded Captain Trimblett, loudly.

Mr. Walters eyed him uneasily, and with his cap firmly gripped in his left hand saluted him with the right. Then he turned his head sideways toward the passage. The captain repeated his question in a voice, if anything, louder than before.

The strained appearance of Mr. Walters's countenance relaxed.

"Come here for my baccy-box, wot I left here the other day," he said, glibly, "when you sent me."

"What were you making that infernal row about, then?" demanded the captain.

Mr. Walters cast an appealing glance toward the passage and listened acutely. "I was—grumbling because—I couldn't—find it," he said, with painstaking precision.

"Grumbling?" repeated the captain. "That ugly voice of yours was enough to bring the ceiling down. What was the matter with that man that burst out of the gate as we came in, eh?"

The boatswain's face took on a wooden expression.

"He—his nose was bleeding," he said, at last.

"I know that," said the captain, grimly; "but what made it bleed?"

For a moment Mr. Walters looked like a man who has been given a riddle too difficult for human solution. Then his face cleared again.

"He—he told me—he was object—subject to it," he stammered. "Been like it since he was a baby."

He shifted his weight to his other foot and shrugged eloquently the shoulder near the passage.

"What did you do to him?" demanded the captain, in a low, stern voice.

"Me, sir?" said Mr. Walters, with clumsy surprise. "Me, sir? I—I—all I done—all I done—was ta put a door-key down his back."

"Door-key?" roared the captain.

"To—to stop the bleeding, sir," said Mr. Walters, looking at the floor and nervously twisting his cap in his hands. "It's a old-fashioned—"

"That'll do," exclaimed the captain, in a choking voice, "that'll do. I don't want any more of your lies. How dare you come to Mr. Hartley's house and knock his milkman about, eh? How dare you? What do you mean by it?"

Mr. Walters fumbled with his cap again. "I was sitting in the kitchen," he said at last, "sitting in the kitchen—hunting 'igh and low for my baccy-box—when this 'ere miserable, insulting chap shoves his head in at the door and calls the young lady names."

"Names?" said the captain, frowning, and waving an interruption from Hartley aside. "What names?"

Mr. Walters hesitated again, and his brow grew almost as black as the captain's.

"'Rosy-lips,'" he said, at last; "and I give 'im such a wipe acrost—"

"Out you go," cried the wrathful captain. "Out you go, and if I hear your pretty little voice in this house again you'll remember it, I can tell you. D'ye hear? Scoot!"

Mr. Walters said "Thank you," and, retiring with an air of great deference, closed the door softly behind him.

"There's another of them," said Captain Trimblett subsiding into a chair. "And from little things I had heard here and there I thought he regarded women as poison. Fate again, I suppose; he was made to regard them as poison all these years for the sake of being caught by that tow-headed wench in your kitchen."

CHAPTER XII

BY no means insensible to the difficulties in the way, Joan Hartley had given no encouragement to Mr. Robert Vyner to follow up the advantage afforded him by her admission at the breakfast-table. Her father's uneasiness, coupled with the broad hints which Captain Trimblett mistook for tactfulness, only confirmed her in her resolution; and Mr. Vyner, in his calmer moments, had to admit to himself that she was right—for the present, at any rate. Meantime, they were both young, and, with the confidence of youth, he looked forward to a future in which his father's well-known views on social distinctions and fitting matrimonial alliances should have undergone a complete change. As to his mother, she merely seconded his father's opinions, and, with admiration born of love and her marriage vows, filed them for reference in a memory which had on more than one occasion been a source of great embarrassment to a man who had not lived for over fifty years without changing some of them.

Deeply conscious of his own moderation, it was, therefore, with a sense of annoyance that Mr. Robert Vyner discovered that Captain Trimblett was actually attempting to tackle him upon the subject which he considered least suitable for discussion. They were sitting in his office, and the captain, in pursuance of a promise to Hartley, after two or three references to the weather, and a long account of an uninteresting conversation with a policeman, began to get on to dangerous ground.

"I've been in the firm's service a good many years now," he began.

"I hope you'll be in as many more," said Vyner, regarding him almost affectionately.

"Hartley has been with you a long time, too," continued Trimblett, slowly. "We became chums the first time we met, and we've been friends ever since. Not just fair-weather friends, but close and hearty; else I wouldn't venture to speak to you as I'm going to speak."

Mr. Vyner looked up at him suddenly, his face hard and forbidding. Then, as he saw the embarrassment in the kindly old face before him, his anger vanished and he bent his head to hide a smile.

"Fire away," he said, cordially.

"I'm an old man," began the captain, solemnly.

"Nonsense," interrupted Robert, breezily. "Old man indeed! A man is as old as he feels, and I saw you the other night, outside the Golden Fleece, with Captain Walsh—"