on't intrude on you any longer," said Miss Winthrop. "Oh! Look
there! How rude of them!"

The others turned hastily in time to see several heads vanish from the
window. Captain Crippen was the first to speak.

"Jem!" said Mrs. Pepper severely, before he had finished.

"Captain Budd!" said Miss Winthrop, flushing.

The incensed captain rose to his feet and paced up and down the room. He
looked at the ex-pilot, and that small schemer shivered.

"Easy does it, cap'n," he murmured, with a wink which he meant to be
comforting.

"I'm going out a little way," said the captain, after the rector's
daughter had gone. "Just to cool my head."

Mrs. Pepper took her bonnet from its peg behind the door, and, surveying
herself in the glass, tied it beneath her chin.

"Alone," said Crippen nervously. "I want to do a little thinking."

"Never again, Jem," said Mrs. Pepper firmly. "My place is by your side.
If you're ashamed of people looking at you, I'm not. I'm proud of you.
Come along. Come and show yourself, and tell them who you are. You shall
never go out of my sight again as long as I live. Never."

She began to whimper.

"What's to be done?" inquired Crippen, turning desperately on the
bewildered pilot.

"What's it got to do with him?" demanded Mrs. Pepper sharply.

"He's got to be considered a little, I s'pose," said the captain,
dissembling. "Besides, I think I'd better do like the man in the poetry
did. Let me go away and die of a broken heart. Perhaps it's best."

Mrs. Pepper looked at him with kindling eyes.

"Let me go away and die of a broken heart," repeated the captain, with
real feeling. "I'd rather do it. I would indeed."

Mrs. Pepper, bursting into angry tears, flung her arms round his neck
again, and sobbed on his shoulder. The pilot, obeying the frenzied
injunctions of his friend's eye, drew down the blind.

"There's quite a crowd outside," he remarked.

"I don't mind," said his wife amiably. "They'll soon know who he is."

She stood holding the captain's hand and stroking it, and whenever his
feelings became too much for her put her head down on his waistcoat. At
such times the captain glared fiercely at the ex-pilot, who, being of
a weak nature, was unable, despite his anxiety, to give his risible
faculties that control which the solemnity of the occasion demanded.

The afternoon wore slowly away. Miss Winthrop, who disliked scandal,
had allowed something of the affair to leak out, and severa