of his chair and stood
adjusting his collar and waistcoat.

"If I couldn't be a chrysalis," he said, slowly, as he looked down at
the recumbent figure of the captain, "do you know what I would like to
be?"

"I've had a very hard day's work," said the other, defensively, as he
struggled into a sitting posture--"very hard. And I was awake half the
night with the toothache."

"That isn't an answer to my question," said Mr. Vyner, gently. "But
never mind; try and get a little sleep now; try and check that feverish
desire for work, which is slowly, very, very slowly, wearing you to skin
and bone. Think how grieved the firm would be if the toothache carried
you off one night. Why not go below and turn in now? It's nearly five
o'clock."

"Couldn't sleep if I did," replied the captain, gravely. "Besides, I've
got somebody coming aboard to have tea with me this afternoon."

"All right, I'm going," said Robert, reassuringly. "Nobody I know, I
suppose?"

"No," said the captain. "Not exactly," he added, with a desire of being
strictly accurate.

Mr. Vyner became thoughtful. The captain's reticence, coupled with
the fact that he had made two or three attempts to get rid of him that
afternoon, was suspicious. He wondered whether Joan Hartley was the
expected guest; the captain's unwillingness to talk whenever her name
came up having by no means escaped him. And once or twice the captain
had, with unmistakable meaning, dropped hints as to the progress made
by Mr. Saunders in horticulture and other pursuits. At the idea of this
elderly mariner indulging in matrimonial schemes with which he had no
sympathy, he became possessed with a spirit of vindictive emulation.

"It seems like a riddle; you've excited my curiosity," he said, as he
threw himself back in the chair again and looked at the gulls wheeling
lazily overhead. "Let me see whether I can guess--I'll go as soon as I
have."

"'Tisn't worth guessing," said Captain Trimblett, with a touch of
brusqueness.

"Don't make it too easy," pleaded Mr. Vyner. "Guess number one: a lady?"

The captain grunted.

"A widow," continued Mr. Vyner, in the slow, rapt tones of a
clairvoyant. "The widow!"

"What do you mean by _the_ widow?" demanded the aroused captain.

"The one you are always talking about," replied Mr. Vyner, winking at
the sky.

"Me!" said the captain, purpling. "I don't talk about her. You don't
hear me talk about her. I'm not always talking about anybody. I