“Hi!  Ferrers!  Look yer—­Say!  Wot’s your hurry, pardner?”

But there was no response.  The thick mist, which hid the surrounding objects, seemed to deaden all sound also.  After a moment’s pause he closed the door, but did not lock it, and retreating to the center of the room remained blinking at the two candles and plucking some perplexing problem from his beard.  Suddenly an idea seized him.  Rosey!  Where was she?  Perhaps it had been a preconcerted plan, and she had fled with him.  Putting out the lights he stumbled hurriedly through the passage to the gangway above.  The cabin—­door was open; there was the sound of voices—­Renshaw’s and Rosey’s.  Mr. Nott felt relieved but not unembarrassed.  He would have avoided his daughter’s presence that evening.  But even while making this resolution with characteristic infelicity he blundered into the room.  Rosey looked up with a slight start; Renshaw’s animated face was changed to its former expression of inward discontent.

“You came in so like a ghost, father,” said Rosey with a slight peevishness that was new to her.  “And I thought you were in town.  Don’t go, Mr. Renshaw.”

But Mr. Renshaw intimated that he had already trespassed upon Miss Nott’s time, and that no doubt her father wanted to talk with her.  To his surprise and annoyance, however, Mr. Nott insisted on accompanying him to his room, and without heeding Renshaw’s cold “Goodnight,” entered and closed the door behind him.

“P’raps,” said Mr. Nott with a troubled air, “you disremember that when you first kem here you asked me if you could hev that ’er loft that the Frenchman had downstairs.”

“No, I don’t remember it,” said Renshaw almost rudely.  “But,” he added, after a pause, with the air of a man obliged to revive a stale and unpleasant memory, “if I did—­what about it?”

“Nuthin’, only that you kin hev it to-morrow, ez that ’ere Frenchman is movin’ out,” responded Nott.  “I thought you was sorter keen about it when you first kem.”

“Umph! we’ll talk about it to-morrow.”  Something in the look of wearied perplexity with which Mr. Nott was beginning to regard his own mal a propos presence, arrested the young man’s attention.  “What’s the reason you didn’t sell this old ship long ago, take a decent house in the town, and bring up your daughter like a lady?” he asked, with a sudden blunt good-humor.  But even this implied blasphemy against the habitation he worshiped did not prevent Mr. Nott from his usual misconstruction of the question.

“I reckon, now, Rosey’s got high-flown ideas of livin’ in a castle with ruins, eh?” he said cunningly.

“Haven’t heard her say,” returned Renshaw abruptly.  “Good-night.”

Firmly convinced that Rosey had been unable to conceal from Mr. Renshaw the influence of her dreams of a castellated future with De Ferrieres, he regained the cabin.  Satisfying himself that his daughter had retired, he sought his own couch.  But not to sleep.  The figure of De Ferrieres, standing in the ship side and melting into the outer darkness, haunted him, and compelled him in dreams to rise and follow him through the alleys and byways of the crowded city.  Again, it was a part of his morbid suspicion that he now invested the absent man with a potential significance and an unknown power.