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Off and on he must have kept this up for more than an hour; then at length he subsided, finding, I suppose, that one German baker, however infuriated, was unable to make an impression on a three-inch deck. By the end of the second hour we had forgotten all about him, for heeling over in the pleasant breeze, and what with singing and telling stories and flirting in the moonlight we were all too happy and too busy to take thought of the stifling lovers below our feet. Occasionally I had a haunting sense of a day of reckoning, but I held my peace and forebore to disquiet my pretty hostess, who was the life and soul of the whole party aboard, and whose silvery laughter chimed in so sweetly with the tropic night and the rippling gurgle of water along our keel.

It was past three o’clock when we picked up the Mission light and ran back to our moorings off the Firm. Then the question arose as to who would uncage our love-birds and bear the first brunt of Silver Tongue’s explosion. I confess I was very little eager for the job, and felt a peculiar sinking in the region of my watch pocket as we unlocked the after-hatch and rolled it softly back, Sasa, with a bull’s-eye lantern penetrating the gloom with a dazzling circle of light. It fell on the figures of Rosalie and Silver Tongue seated on a settee and locked in each other’s arms. Rosalie was asleep, with her graceful head lying on Silver Tongue’s breast and her long lashes still wet with tears. The baker, his face crimson with heat and streaked with rivulets of perspiration, looked up at us grimly through a sort of mist. I waited for him to spring to his feet and throw himself like a lion on my shrinking form; but, instead of doing so, he pressed his arms closer round Rosalie and smiled–yes, by Jove, smiled–and, if you’ll take the word of a retired master mariner, winked, with a peculiar, tender and calfish expression that in anybody else would have been called skittish.

“How goes it, old man?” I said.

“Gaptain,” he returned in the tone of a clarionet tootling a love passage in grand opera, “me and Rosalie invites you all to the Bublic Hall Thursday night to dance at our wedding!”