“What the dickens are you looking like that for?” he demanded.

“I’ve been surprised, sir,” conceded Mr. Wilks; “surprised and astonished.”

Wrath blazed again in the captain’s eyes and set lines in his forehead.  He was being pitied by a steward!

“You’ve been drinking,” he said, crisply; “put that bag down.”

“Arsking your pardon, sir,” said the steward, twisting his unusually dry lips into a smile, “but I’ve ‘ad no opportunity, sir—­I’ve been follerin’ you all day, sir.”

A servant opened the door.  “You’ve been soaking in it for a month,” declared the captain as he entered the hall.  “Why the blazes don’t you bring that bag in?  Are you so drunk you don’t know what you are doing?”

Mr. Wilks picked the bag up and followed humbly into the house.  Then he lost his head altogether, and gave some colour to his superior officer’s charges by first cannoning into the servant and then wedging the captain firmly in the doorway of the sitting-room with the bag.

“Steward!” rasped the captain.

“Yessir,” said the unhappy Mr. Wilks.

“Go and sit down in the kitchen, and don’t leave this house till you’re sober.”

Mr. Wilks disappeared.  He was not in his first lustre, but he was an ardent admirer of the sex, and in an absent-minded way he passed his arm round the handmaiden’s waist, and sustained a buffet which made his head ring.

“A man o’ your age, and drunk, too,” explained the damsel.

Mr. Wilks denied both charges.  It appeared that he was much younger than he looked, while, as for drink, he had forgotten the taste of it.  A question as to the reception Ann would have accorded a boyish teetotaler remained unanswered.

In the sitting-room Mrs. Kingdom, the captain’s widowed sister, put down her crochet-work as her brother entered, and turned to him expectantly.  There was an expression of loving sympathy on her mild and rather foolish face, and the captain stiffened at once.

“I was in the wrong,” he said, harshly, as he dropped into a chair; “my certificate has been suspended for six months, and my first officer has been commended.”

“Suspended?” gasped Mrs. Kingdom, pushing back the white streamer to the cap which she wore in memory of the late Mr. Kingdom, and sitting upright.  You?”

“I think that’s what I said,” replied her brother.

Mrs. Kingdom gazed at him mournfully, and, putting her hand behind her, began a wriggling search in her pocket for a handkerchief, with the idea of paying a wholesome tribute of tears.  She was a past-master in the art of grief, and, pending its extraction, a docile tear hung on her eyelid and waited.  The captain eyed her preparations with silent anger.

“I am not surprised,” said Mrs. Kingdom, dabbing her eyes; “I expected it somehow.  I seemed to have a warning of it.  Something seemed to tell me; I couldn’t explain, but I seemed to know.”