y need this lace collar, and I suppose I _could_ brave the perils
of the deep without that turquoise necklace."

"I took what I could get," explained he. "It's my rule of life."

"Did you obey my orders? Yes, I see you did. Put on your overcoat at
once. It's cold. And you're awfully wet," she added, with charming
dismay, looking at his feet.

"They'll dry out. There's quite a little water below."

Little Miss Grouch studied him for a moment of half-smiling
consideration. "I want to ask you something," she said presently.

"Ask, O Queen, and it shall be answered you."

"Would you have come after me just the same if--if I'd been really a
Miss Grouch, and red-nosed, and puffy-faced, and a frump, and homely?"

He took the question under advisement, with a gravity suitable to its
import. "Not just the same," he decided, "not as--as anxiously."

"But you'd have come?"

"Oh, yes, I'd have come."

"I thought so." Her voice was strange. There was a pause. "Do you know
you're a most exasperating person? It wouldn't make any difference to
you who a woman was, if she needed help, whether she was in the
steerage--"

He leaped to his feet. "The baby!" he cried, "and his mother. I'd
forgotten."

On the word he was gone. Little Miss Grouch looked after him, and there
was a light in her eyes which no human being had ever surprised
there--and which would have vastly surprised herself had she appreciated
the purport of it.

In five minutes he was back, having calmly violated one of the most
rigid of ship's rules, in bringing steerage passengers up to the first
cabin.

"Here's the Unparalleled Urchin," he announced, "right as a trivet.
Here, let's make a little camp." He pulled around a settee, established
the frightened but quiet mother and the big-eyed child on it, drew up a
chair for himself next to the girl and said, "Now we can wait
comfortably for whatever comes."

News it was that came, in the course of half an hour. An official, the
genuineness of whose relief was patent, announced that the leak was
above water-line, that it was being patched, that the ship was on her
way and that there was absolutely no danger, his statement being backed
up by the resumed throb of the engines and the sound of many hammers on
the port side. Stateroom holders in D and E, however, he added, would
best arrange to remain in the saloon until morning.

So the Tyro conveyed his adoptive charges back to the steerage, and
returned to hi