making any plan of redress until he reached England.  Of Miss Eversleigh he was more communicative.  “You would have liked her better, my lad, it you hadn’t been bewitched by the Avondale woman, for she is the whitest of the Dorntons.”  In vain Randolph protested truthfully, yet with an even more convincing color, that it had made no difference, and he had liked her.  The captain laughed.  “Ay, lad!  But she’s a poor orphan, with scarcely a hundred pounds a year, who lives with her guardian, an old clergyman.  And yet,” he added grimly, “there are only three lives between her and the property—­mine, Bobby’s, and Bill’s—­unless he should marry and have an heir.”

“The more reason why you should assert yourself and do what you can for her now,” said Randolph eagerly.

“Ay,” returned the captain, with his usual laugh, “when she was a child I used to call her my little sweetheart, and gave her a ring, and I reckon I promised to marry her, too, when she grew up.”

The truthful Randolph would have told him of Miss Evereleigh’s gift, but unfortunately he felt himself again blushing, and fearful lest the captain would misconstrue his confusion, he said nothing.

Except on this occasion, the captain talked with Randolph chiefly of his later past,—­of voyages he had made, of places they were passing, and ports they visited.  He spent much of the time with the officers, and even the crew, over whom he seemed to exercise a singular power, and with whom he exhibited an odd freemasonry.  To Randolph’s eyes he appeared to grow in strength and stature in the salt breath of the sea, and although he was uniformly kind, even affectionate, to him, he was brusque to the other passengers, and at times even with his friends the sailors.  Randolph sometimes wondered how he would treat a crew of his own.  He found some answer to that question in the captain’s manner to Jack Redhill, the abstractor of the portmanteau, and his old shipmate, who was accompanying the captain in some dependent capacity, but who received his master’s confidences and orders with respectful devotion.

It was a cold, foggy morning, nearly two months later, that they landed at Plymouth.  The English coast had been a vague blank all night, only pierced, long hours apart, by dim star-points or weird yellow beacon flashes against the horizon.  And this vagueness and unreality increased on landing, until it seemed to Randolph that they had slipped into a land of dreams.  The illusion was kept up as they walked in the weird shadows through half-lit streets into a murky railway station throbbing with steam and sudden angry flashes in the darkness, and then drew away into what ought to have been the open country, but was only gray plains of mist against a lost horizon.  Sometimes even the vague outlook was obliterated by passing trains coming from nowhere and slipping into nothingness.  As they crept along with the day, without, however,