'You should always be able to get command of a ship, Captain Jackman,' said the girl.
'Not so easy now I have been dismissed for theft.'
'Oh no!' muttered the commander, 'dismissed for a misadventure. Had it been theft, sir, you would not have been here, nor should we be enjoying the splendid dinner you are giving us.'
He tippled down another glass of champagne. Very good champagne it was; his eyes beamed with it and the port, and the hardness had dissolved from his looks, and his face expressed the smiling side of him.
'They'll all understand what my discharge means,' said the captain. 'I had served the owners with heroic honesty, having brought off their lumbering merchantman from a very heavy ugly pirate, right amidships of the Atlantic. We made a running fight of it, and I brought the rogue's foretopgallant mast down. The villain rounded to, and my good friends' bales and tea were saved.'
'They choose to forget that,' said Miss Conway warmly.
'A shipowner,' said the captain, in a soft voice, addressing himself to the girl, 'is by birth a scoundrel, who will not forgive you one error--one oversight'--his forefinger flew up in seeming passion--'be your record the most dutiful, honourable, and lucrative of them all.'
'I can believe it,' said the commander, with a loud laugh; 'and yet you are for choosing the red flag instead of my own glorious colour.'
'How long were you at sea last voyage?' asked Miss Conway, whilst the captain gloomily gazed at the commander.
'And you have had command in other ships?' she said.
'You are a young man,' she exclaimed, whilst her eyes lingered upon his face with evident delight, 'to have been in command so long.'
'Shall I tell you a secret, madam?' said he, smiling. 'In fact, shall I tell you my age? Then learn it by this, that I was twenty when I first took charge of a ship.'
'Very young and very creditable. It works you out at about thirty,' said the commander.
The captain bowed as if to a sentence of kindness.
He dined them as sumptuously as the shops of that place could provide: and after dinner they went upstairs to a spinet, where Miss Conway gave them some music. She played very prettily, and sang also. But her singing was not of the fine quality you would have expected in a girl who possessed a voice. Captain Jackman's eyes were riveted to her all the while she sat at the spinet; and he declined to give heed when the sturdy old commander slung a question across the room to him in the midst of his daughter's performance. A strange old room in a vanished inn! You can dine on the site, but not in the house. It was probably then a hundred years old, was low pitched, wainscot bright with time, ceiling covered with carvings of flying Cupids and fruits, and the furniture was in keeping, dull, dim, and dusty.