So two or three hours went by, as we plunged on, to the seething sound of the water, and the singing of our sails, and all the various rumour of wind and sea.  After all, it was a good music to sleep to, and, for all my scorn of sleeping landsmen, an irresistible drowsiness stretched me out on the roof of the little cabin, wonderfully rocked into forgetfulness.

My nap came to an end suddenly, as though some one had flung me out through a door of blue and gold into a new-born world.  There was the sun rising, the moon still on duty, and the morning star divinely naked in the heaven.  And, with these glories, there rushed in again upon my ears the lovely zest and turmoil of the sea, heaving huge and tumultuous about us in gleaming hills and foam-flecked valleys.

And there was Charlie, his broad face beaming with boyish happiness, and something like a fatherly gentleness in his eyes, as he watched his companion at the tiller, whom, for a half-asleep moment of waking, I couldn’t account for, till our start all came back to me, when I realised that it was our young scapegrace of over-night.  Charlie and he evidently were on the best of terms already.

“Nice sailor you are!” Charlie laughed, as I sat up rubbing my eyes.  “Falling asleep on watch!  Our young friend here is worth ten of you.”

I smiled good morning to our young passenger.

“How about the court-martial on his looks you spoke of last night, Charlie?” I asked.

“Well, he’s not pock-marked, at all events, is he?—­he told the truth so far.  But I’ve still a question or two to ask him before we leave West End.  We’ll have breakfast first—­to give him courage.”

The lad made a humorous face to suggest his fear of the ordeal; as he did so, I took a good look at him.  Charlie might easily have said a little more about his looks, had it been in his line, for, so far from being only “not pock-marked,” he was something more like a young Apollo:  some six feet in height, upstanding like the statue of a Greek athlete; a rich olive skin, through which the pink of youth came and went; and splendid blue-green eyes, fearless, and yet shy as a lad’s eyes often are—­at that moment of development when a good-looking lad, in spite of his height and muscles, has something of the bloom and purity of a girl, without in the least suggesting effeminacy.  So, many tall athletic girls, for a brief period, suggest boys—­without there being the least danger of mistake as to their real sex.

He was evidently very young—­scarcely more than eighteen—­and had a great tendency to blush, for all his attempt at nonchalant grown-up airs.  He was the very embodiment of youth, in its sun-tipped morning flower.  What Charlie could have to “question” this artless young being—­as incapable of plotting, it seemed to me, as a young faun—­passed my conjecture; but, as Charlie had given me a quiet wink, as he spoke of the after-breakfast examination, I suspected that it was one of those jokes of his which are apt to have something of the simplicity and roughness of seafaring tradition.