h
stayed with the exhorter.

Julian, without seeing the newcomer, once more broke forth, this time
plainly intending to make every one his listener: "No, we don't
interrupt and we shall not."

"Oh, no," daringly put in an ironical hearer, "Hayle's twins, they never
interrupt an innocent pleasure!"

"How air it innercent?" called John the Baptist, at Hugh's side, rising
again and gesticulating. "No theayter play kin be innercent an' much
less this-yeh one, by reason 'at they ah cause to believe that-ah
servant-gal----"

He was pulled down again with even less ceremony than before, though by
friendlier hands, hands of the two lenders of the sword-canes, who fell
to counselling him in crafty undertones. But Julian was talking dead
ahead, ignoring all distractions and not even yet discovering Hugh:

"We didn't more than whisper, general, till the curtain fell. Now, did
we? When it rises again--what, sir?... My dear senator! it's our fellow
passengers who don't see--that their kind intentions are being made part
of a put-up game to torment us to leave the boat.... Oh, no, they--why,
sir, the dastards set it a-going the moment they'd persuaded our ladies
to stay and risk their priceless lives nursing those damned Dutch on the
lower deck."

The senator ached to be the steamer's length removed but saw no way of
dignified escape. Several listeners, remembering Ramsey's tactics and
their success, gayly laughed, but two or three gasped an audible dismay;
two or three men said, "Sh-sh-sh!" two or three said, "Ladies present,"
"Remember the ladies," and some one droned out in a mock voice: "The
stage waits."

And plainly it did so; waited on the audience, with Mrs. Gilmore peeping
through the curtain, whose rise would reveal "Harriet" alone; a terrible
risk if the exhorter should get in the bolt he was trying to launch.

"Oh, where is Mr. Gilmore?" thought Ramsey, and, "Why don't they call
again for 'Gideon's Band'? Yet who would sing it?" Her distressed lips
were silently asking many such questions when she sprang up and halted
the Californian, who had come in at her back on his way to Hugh.

"How's the captain?" she whispered in smiling agitation.

With low affirmative bows, so enraptured to be speaking with her as to
be all but speechless, he murmured: "Get'--getting on--so far." He waved
an oddly delicate hand--backward from the wrist, girlishly--"He's
all--hunkadory."

"And Basile?" Anxious as she was, she yet saw