“By George, Clinch, you were on the soundings there, had you but known it!  Our prisoner has been in that part of the world, and we might get some clue to his manoeuvres, by questioning the old woman closely.  I hope you parted good friends?”

“The best in the world, Captain Cuffe.  No one that feeds and lodges me well, need dread me as an enemy!”

“I’ll warrant it!  That’s the reason you are so loyal, Clinch?”

The hard, red face of the master’s mate worked a little, and, though he could not well look all sorts of colors, he looked all ways but in his captain’s eye.  It was now ten years since he ought to have been a lieutenant, having once actually outranked Cuffe, in the way of date of service at least; and his conscience told him two things quite distinctly:  first, the fact of his long and weary probation; second, that it was, in a great degree, his own fault.

“I love His Majesty, sir,” Clinch observed, after giving a gulp, “and I never lay anything that goes hard with myself to his account.  Still, memory will be memory; and spite of all I can do, sir, I sometimes remember what I might have been, as well as what I am.  If his Majesty does feed me, it is with the spoon of a master’s mate; and if he does lodge me, it is in the cockpit.”

“I have been your shipmate often, and for years at a time,” answered Cuffe good-naturedly, though a little in the manner of a superior; “and no one knows your history better.  It is not your friends who have failed you at need, so much as a certain enemy, with whom you will insist on associating, though he harms them most who love him best.”

“Aye, aye, sir—­that can’t be denied, Captain Cuffe; yet it’s a hard life that passes altogether without hope.”

This was uttered with an expression of melancholy that said more for Clinch’s character than Cuffe had witnessed in the man for years, and it revived many early impressions in his favor.  Clinch and he had once been messmates, even; and though years of a decided disparity in rank had since interposed their barrier of etiquette and feeling, Cuffe never could entirely forget the circumstance.

“It is hard, indeed, to live as you say, without hope,” returned the captain; “but hope ought to be the last thing to die.  You should make one more rally, Clinch, before you throw up in despair.”

“It is not so much for myself, Captain Cuffe, that I mind it, as for some that live ashore.  My father was as reputable a tradesman as there was in Plymouth, and when he got me on the quarter-deck he thought he was about to make a gentleman of me, instead of leaving me to pass a life in a situation that may be said to be even beneath what his own was.”

“Now you undervalue your station, Clinch.  The berth of a master’s-mate in one of His Majesty’s finest frigates is something to be proud of; I was once a master’s-mate—­nay, Nelson has doubtless filled the same station.  For that matter, one of His Majesty’s own sons may have gone through the rank.”