red on deck, and Captain Cuttle,
triumphing in the success of his enterprise, conducted Florence back to
the coach, while Bunsby followed, escorting Miss Nipper, whom he
hugged upon the way (much to that young lady's indignation) with his
pilot-coated arm, like a blue bear.

The Captain put his oracle inside, and gloried so much in having secured
him, and having got that mind into a hackney-coach, that he could not
refrain from often peeping in at Florence through the little window
behind the driver, and testifying his delight in smiles, and also in
taps upon his forehead, to hint to her that the brain of Bunsby was
hard at it' In the meantime, Bunsby, still hugging Miss Nipper (for his
friend, the Captain, had not exaggerated the softness of his heart),
uniformly preserved his gravity of deportment, and showed no other
consciousness of her or anything.

Uncle Sol, who had come home, received them at the door, and ushered
them immediately into the little back parlour: strangely altered by the
absence of Walter. On the table, and about the room, were the charts
and maps on which the heavy-hearted Instrument-maker had again and again
tracked the missing vessel across the sea, and on which, with a pair of
compasses that he still had in his hand, he had been measuring, a minute
before, how far she must have driven, to have driven here or there:
and trying to demonstrate that a long time must elapse before hope was
exhausted.

'Whether she can have run,' said Uncle Sol, looking wistfully over the
chart; 'but no, that's almost impossible or whether she can have been
forced by stress of weather,--but that's not reasonably likely. Or
whether there is any hope she so far changed her course as--but even I
can hardly hope that!' With such broken suggestions, poor old Uncle Sol
roamed over the great sheet before him, and could not find a speck of
hopeful probability in it large enough to set one small point of the
compasses upon.

Florence saw immediately--it would have been difficult to help
seeing--that there was a singular, indescribable change in the old
man, and that while his manner was far more restless and unsettled
than usual, there was yet a curious, contradictory decision in it, that
perplexed her very much. She fancied once that he spoke wildly, and at
random; for on her saying she regretted not to have seen him when she
had been there before that morning, he at first replied that he had
been to see her, and direct