The captain stared, but made no comment.  Disappointed in his son, he turned for consolation to his daughter, noting with some concern the unaccountable changes which that young lady underwent during his absences.  He noticed a difference after every voyage.  He left behind him on one occasion a nice trim little girl, and returned to find a creature all legs and arms.  He returned again and found the arms less obnoxious and the legs hidden by a long skirt; and as he complained in secret astonishment to his sister, she had developed a motherly manner in her dealings with him which was almost unbearable.

“She’ll grow out of it soon,” said Mrs. Kingdom; “you wait and see.”

The captain growled and waited, and found his sister’s prognostications partly fulfilled.  The exuberance of Miss Nugent’s manner was certainly modified by time, but she developed instead a quiet, unassuming habit of authority which he liked as little.

“She gets made such a fuss of, it’s no wonder,” said Mrs. Kingdom, with a satisfied smile.  “I never heard of a girl getting as much attention as she does; it’s a wonder her head isn’t turned.”

“Eh!” said the startled captain; “she’d better not let me see anything of it.”

“Just so,” said Mrs. Kingdom.

The captain dwelt on these words and kept his eyes open, and, owing to his daughter’s benevolent efforts on his behalf, had them fully occupied.  He went to sea firmly convinced that she would do something foolish in the matrimonial line, the glowing terms in which he had overheard her describing the charms of the new postman to Mrs. Kingdom filling him with the direst forebodings.

It was his last voyage.  An unexpected windfall from an almost forgotten uncle and his own investments had placed him in a position of modest comfort, and just before Miss Nugent reached her twentieth birthday he resolved to spend his declining days ashore and give her those advantages of parental attention from which she had been so long debarred.

Mr. Wilks, to the inconsolable grief of his ship-mates, left with him.  He had been for nearly a couple of years in receipt of an annuity purchased for him under the will of his mother, and his defection left a gap never to be filled among comrades who had for some time regarded him in the light of an improved drinking fountain.

CHAPTER V

On a fine afternoon, some two months after his release from the toils of the sea, Captain Nugent sat in the special parlour of The Goblets.  The old inn offers hospitality to all, but one parlour has by ancient tradition and the exercise of self-restraint and proper feeling been from time immemorial reserved for the elite of the town.

The captain, confident in the security of these unwritten regulations, conversed freely with his peers.  He had been moved to speech by the utter absence of discipline ashore, and from that had wandered to the growing evil of revolutionary ideas at sea.  His remarks were much applauded, and two brother-captains listened with grave respect to a disquisition on the wrongs of shipmasters ensuing on the fancied rights of sailor men, the only discordant note being struck by the harbour-master, a man whose ideas had probably been insidiously sapped by a long residence ashore.