with innocent pleasures.  When they reached the hotel they found that, though scandalously late, they were in time for all the dinner they were likely to sit down to.  Confusion reigned in the apartments of the Moreens—­very shabby ones this time, but the best in the house—­and before the interrupted service of the table, with objects displaced almost as if there had been a scuffle and a great wine-stain from an overturned bottle, Pemberton couldn’t blink the fact that there had been a scene of the last proprietary firmness.  The storm had come—­they were all seeking refuge.  The hatches were down, Paula and Amy were invisible—­they had never tried the most casual art upon Pemberton, but he felt they had enough of an eye to him not to wish to meet him as young ladies whose frocks had been confiscated—­and Ulick appeared to have jumped overboard.  The host and his staff, in a word, had ceased to “go on” at the pace of their guests, and the air of embarrassed detention, thanks to a pile of gaping trunks in the passage, was strangely commingled with the air of indignant withdrawal.  When Morgan took all this in—­and he took it in very quickly—­he coloured to the roots of his hair.  He had walked from his infancy among difficulties and dangers, but he had never seen a public exposure.  Pemberton noticed in a second glance at him that the tears had rushed into his eyes and that they were tears of a new and untasted bitterness.  He wondered an instant, for the boy’s sake, whether he might successfully pretend not to understand.  Not successfully, he felt, as Mr. and Mrs. Moreen, dinnerless by their extinguished hearth, rose before him in their little dishonoured salon, casting about with glassy eyes for the nearest port in such a storm.  They were not prostrate but were horribly white, and Mrs. Moreen had evidently been crying.  Pemberton quickly learned however that her grief was not for the loss of her dinner, much as she usually enjoyed it, but the fruit of a blow that struck even deeper, as she made all haste to explain.  He would see for himself, so far as that went, how the great change had come, the dreadful bolt had fallen, and how they would now all have to turn themselves about.  Therefore cruel as it was to them to part with their darling she must look to him to carry a little further the influence he had so fortunately acquired with the boy—­to induce his young charge to follow him into some modest retreat.  They depended on him—­that was the fact—­to take their delightful child temporarily under his protection; it would leave Mr. Moreen and herself so much more free to give the proper attention (too little, alas! had been given) to the readjustment of their affairs.

“We trust you—­we feel we can,” said Mrs. Moreen, slowly rubbing her plump white hands and looking with compunction hard at Morgan, whose chin, not to take liberties, her husband stroked with a paternal forefinger.

“Oh yes—­we feel that we can.  We trust Mr. Pemberton fully, Morgan,” Mr. Moreen pursued.