He woke in the cabin before the fire, and found Tom Lennard blubbering hard over him.  “Warm it seems, Thomas?  Reckon I almost lost my number that time.”

“My good Lewis!  No more.  I had to strip you, and I’ve done everything.  The skipper’s dead beat, and if Bob couldn’t steer we should be in a pickle.  Let me put you in a hot blanket now, and you’ll have some grog.”  Then, with his own queer humour, Lewis Ferrier said, “Tom, all this is only a lesson.  If we’d had a proper boat, a proper lift for sick men, and a proper vessel to lift them into, I should have been all right.  We won’t come back to have these baths quite so often.  We’ll have a ship when we come again, and not merely a thing to sail.  And now give me just a thimble-full of brandy, and then replace the bottle amongst the other poisonous physic!  I’m getting as lively as a grasshopper.  A nautical—­a nautical taste, Thomas!”

And then Ferrier went off to sleep just where he was, after very nearly giving a most convincing proof in his own person of the necessity for a hospital vessel.

Lennard brooded long, and at last he went to the skipper and asked, “Old man, shall Bob shove her head for home?”

The skipper nodded.

And now you may see why I purposely made this chapter so long.

You have an accurate picture of what goes on during all the snowy months on that wild North water!

CHAPTER III.

THE PLOTTER.

An old gentleman and a tall girl were walking in the secluded grounds of a great house that had once belonged to an unhappy Prince.  The place was very near London, yet that suggestive hum of the City never seemed to pierce the deep glades of the park; the rooks talked and held councils, and tried culprits, and stole, and quarrelled as freely as they might have done in the wilds of Surrey or Wiltshire; the rabbits swarmed, and almost every south-country species of wild bird nested and enjoyed life in the happy, still woods and shrubberies.  Modern—­very modern—­improvements had been added to the body of the old house, but there was nothing vulgar or ostentatious.  Everything about the place, from the old red palace to the placid herd of Alderney cows that grazed in a mighty avenue, spoke of wealth—­wealth solid and well-rooted.  There was no sign of shoddy anywhere; the old gentleman had bought the place at an enormous price, and he had left all the ancient work untouched; but he would have stables, laundry, tennis-court, and so on through the offices and outside buildings, fitted out according to rational principles of sanitation, and, if the truth be told, he would rather have seen healthy ugly stables than the most quaint and curious of living-rooms that ever spread typhoid.