I plucked him from his narrator’s vexatious and inevitable commencement:  ‘Temple, tell me, did she go to the altar?’

He answered ‘Yes!’

‘She did?  Then she’s a widow?’

‘No, she isn’t,’ said Temple, distracting me by submitting to the lead I distracted him by taking.

‘Then her husband’s alive?’

Temple denied it, and a devil seized him to perceive some comicality in the dialogue.

‘Was she married?’

Temple said ‘No,’ with a lurking drollery about his lips.  He added, ’It ‘s nothing to laugh over, Richie.’

’Am I laughing?  Speak out.  Did Edbury come to grief overnight in any way?’

Again Temple pronounced a negative, this time wilfully enigmatical:  he confessed it, and accused me of the provocation.  He dashed some laughter with gravity to prepare for my next assault.

‘Was Edbury the one to throw up the marriage?  Did he decline it?’

‘No,’ was the answer once more.

Temple stopped my wrath by catching at me and begging me to listen.

‘Edbury was drowned, Richie.’

‘Overnight?’

’No, not overnight.  I can tell it all in half-a-dozen words, if you’ll be quiet; and I know you’re going to be as happy as I am, or I shouldn’t trifle an instant.  He went overnight on board the barque Priscilla to see Mabel Sweetwinter, the only woman he ever could have cared for, and he went the voyage, just as we did.  He was trapped, caged, and transported; it’s a repetition, except that the poor old Priscilla never came to land.  She foundered in a storm in the North Sea.  That ’s all we know.  Every soul perished, the captain and all.  I knew how it would be with that crew of his some day or other.  Don’t you remember my saying the Priscilla was the kind of name of a vessel that would go down with all hands, and leave a bottle to float to shore?  A gin-bottle was found on our East coast-the old captain must have discovered in the last few moments that such things were on board—­and in it there was a paper, and the passengers’ and crew’s names in his handwriting, written as if he had been sitting in his parlour at home; over them a line—­“The Lord’s will is about to be done”; and underneath—­“We go to His judgement resigned and cheerful.”  You know the old captain, Richie?

Temple had tears in his eyes.  We both stood blinking for a second or two.

I could not but be curious to hear the reason for Edbury’s having determined to sail.

‘Don’t you understand how it was, Richie?’ said Temple.  ’Edbury went to persuade her to stay, or just to see her for once, and he came to persuasions.  He seems to have been succeeding, but the captain stepped on board and he treated Edbury as he did us two:  he made him take the voyage for discipline’s sake and “his soul’s health."’

‘How do you know all this, Temple?’

’You know your friend Kiomi was one of the party.  The captain sent her back on shore because he had no room for her.  She told us Edbury offered bribes of hundreds and thousands for the captain to let him and Mabel go off in the boat with Kiomi, and then he took to begging to go alone.  He tried to rouse the crew.  The poor fellow cringed, she says; he threatened to swim off.  The captain locked him up.’