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The small crowd in the street, however, seemed in no mind to hinder us. Possibly experience had taught them composure. At any rate they were apathetic, though curious enough to follow us down to the quay and stand watching whilst we embarked our unconscious burdens. A lamp burned foggily at the head of the steps by which we descended to the waterside, and looking up I saw the child who had called herself Meliar-Ann standing in the circle of it, and gazing down upon the embarkation with dark unemotional eyes. Hartnoll spied her too, and waved his recovered dirk triumphantly. She paid him no heed at all.

“But look here,” said the lieutenant, turning on me, “we can’t take you on board to-night–and without your chests. Oh yes–I have your names; Rodd and Hartnoll . . . and a deuced lucky thing for you we tumbled upon you as we did. But Captain Suckling’s orders were–and I heard him give ’em, with my own ears–to fetch you off to-morrow morning. From the Blue Posts, eh? Well, just you run back, or Blue Billy,”–by this irreverent name, as I learned later, the executive officers of his Majesty’s Navy had agreed to know Mr. Benjamin Sheppard, proprietor of the Blue Posts: a solid man, who died worth sixty thousand pounds–“or Blue Billy will be sending round the crier.”

“But, sir, we don’t know where to find the Blue Posts!”

He stared at me, turning with his foot on the boat’s gunwale. “Why, God bless the boy! you’ve only to turn to your left and follow your innocent nose for a hundred and fifty yards, and you’ll run your heads against the doorway.”

We watched the boat as it pushed off. A few of the crowd still lingered on the quay’s edge, and it has since occurred to me to wonder that, as Hartnoll and I turned and ascended the steps, no violence was offered to us. We had come out to flaunt our small selves in his Majesty’s uniform. Here, if ever, was proof of the respect it commanded; and we failed to notice it. Meliar-Ann had disappeared. The loungers on the quay-head let us pass unmolested, and, following the lieutenant’s directions, sure enough within five minutes we found ourselves under the lamp of the Blue Posts!

The night-porter eyed us suspiciously before admitting us. “A man might say that you’ve made a pretty fair beginning,” he ventured; but I had warned Hartnoll to keep his chin up, and we passed in with a fine show of haughty indifference.

At eight o’clock next morning Hartnoll and I were eating our breakfast when the waiter brought a visitor to our box–a tallish midshipman about three years our senior, with a face of the colour of brickdust and a frame that had outgrown his uniform.

“Good-morning, gentlemen,” said he; “and I daresay you guess my business. I’m to take you on board as soon as you can have your boxes ready.”

We asked him if he would do us the honour to share our breakfast: whereupon he nodded.

“To tell you the truth, I was about to suggest it myself. Eh? What have we? Grilled kidneys? Good.”

I called to the waiter to fetch another dish of kidneys.

“And a spatchcock,” added our guest. “They’re famous, here, for spatchcock. And, yes, I think we’ll say an anchovy toast. Tea? Well, perhaps, at this time of the morning–with a poker in it.”

This allusion to a poker we did not understand; but fortunately the waiter did, and brought a glassful of rum, which Mr. Strangways–for so he had made himself known to us–tipped into his tea, assuring us that the great Nelson had ever been wont to refer to this–his favourite mixture–as “the pride of the morning.”

“By the way,” he went on, with his mouth full of kidney, “the second lieutenant tells me you were in luck’s way last night.”