still playing with the glass. "So long! I
know one or two that'll 'ave a fit pretty near when I tell 'em about you
sitting on your 'air."

He put up his left arm instinctively, but Miss Jelks by a supreme effort
maintained her calmness. Her eyes and colour were beyond her control,
but her voice remained steady.

"So long!" she said, quietly. She took the glass from him and smiled.
"If you like to wait a moment, I'll get you a little drop more," she
said, graciously.

"Here's luck!" said Mr. Walters, as she returned with the glass. He
drank it slowly and then, wiping his lips with the back of his hand,
stood regarding her critically.

"Well, so long!" he said again, and, before the astonished maiden could
resist, placed a huge arm about her neck and kissed her.

"You do that again, if you dare!" she gasped, indignantly, as she broke
loose and confronted him. "The idea!"

"I don't want to do it agin," said the boatswain. "I've 'ad a glass of
ale, and you've 'ad a kiss. Now we're quits."

He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand again and walked off with the
air of a man who has just discharged an obligation. He went out the
back way, and Rosa, to whom this sort of man was an absolutely new
experience, stood gazing after him dumbly. Recovering herself, she
followed him to the gate, and, with a countenance on which amazement
still lingered, stood watching his tall figure up the road.

CHAPTER VI

"WORK!" said Mr. Robert Vyner, severely, as he reclined in a deck-chair
on the poop of the _Indian Chief_ and surveyed his surroundings through
half-closed eyes. "Work! It's no good sitting here idling while the
world's work awaits my attention."

Captain Trimblett, who was in a similar posture a yard away, assented.
He also added that there was "nothing like it."

"There's no play without work," continued Mr. Vyner, in a spirit of
self-admonition.

The captain assented again. "You said something about work half an hour
ago," he remarked.

"And I meant it," said Mr. Vyner; "only in unconscious imitation I dozed
off. What I really want is for somebody to take my legs, somebody else
my shoulders, and waft me gently ashore."

"I had a cook o' mine put ashore like that once," said Captain
Trimblett, in a reminiscent voice; "only I don't know that I would have
called it 'wafting,' and, so far as my memory goes, he didn't either. He
had a lot to say about it, too."

Mr. Vyner, with a noisy yawn, struggled out