removed to make room for one of the partitions, the only way the stranger could have reached it was by leaping to one of the rings.  To make sure of this she let herself down holding on to the rings, and dropped a couple of feet to the deck below.  She was in the narrow passage her father had penetrated the previous night.  Before her was the door leading to De Ferriferes’ loft, always locked.  It was silent within; it was the hour when the old Frenchman made his habitual promenade in the city.  But the light from the newly-opened hatch allowed her to see more of the mysterious recesses of the forward bulkhead than she had known before, and she was startled by observing another yawning hatchway at her feet from which the closely-fitting door had been lifted, and which the new lodger had evidently forgotten to close again.  The young girl stooped down and peered cautiously into the black abyss.  Nothing was to be seen, nothing heard but the distant gurgle and click of water in some remoter depth.  She replaced the hatch and returned by way of the passage to the cabin.

When her father came home that night she briefly recounted the interview with the new lodger, and her discovery of his curiosity.  She did this with a possible increase of her usual shyness and abstraction, and apparently more as a duty than a colloquial recreation.  But it pleased Mr. Nott also to give it more than his usual misconception.  “Looking round the ship, was he—­eh, Rosey?” he said with infinite archness.  “In course, kinder sweepin’ round the galley, and offerin’ to fetch you wood and water, eh?” Even when the young girl had picked up her book with the usual faint smile of affectionate tolerance, and then drifted away in its pages, Mr. Nott chuckled audibly.  “I reckon old Frenchy didn’t come by when the young one was bedevlin’ you there.”

“What, father?” said Rosey, lifting her abstracted eyes to his face.

At the moment it seemed impossible that any human intelligence could have suspected deceit or duplicity in Rosey’s clear gaze.  But Mr. Nott’s intelligence was superhuman.  “I was sayin’ that Mr. Ferrieres didn’t happen in while the young feller was there—­eh?”

“No, father,” answered Rosey, with an effort to follow him out of the pages of her book.  “Why?”

But Mr. Nott did not reply.  Later in the evening he awkwardly waylaid the new lodger before the cabin-door as that gentleman would have passed on to his room.

“I’m afraid,” said the young man, glancing at Rosey, “that I intruded upon your daughter to-day.  I was a little curious to see the old ship, and I didn’t know what part of it was private.”