y. "What for?" said
the skipper bruskly.

"To have a look at the convicts, I suppose."

"What good'll that do them?" growled the commander. "Idle curiosity,
that's what I call it. Well, go along. Only, I'll hold you accountable,
and bear this in your mind, no tracts!"

"I don't think," replied Mr. Gillett with some asperity, "you need be
apprehensive on that score, Captain Macpherson. Sir Charles and m'lady
are not that sort."

"Well, keep them away from the bars. The weather has nae improved the
tempers of a few of the rapscallions, and they'd like naught better than
a chance for their claws."

"Thanks for the permission, and," a little stiffly, "the admonition,
which latter," turning away, "a man whose lifelong profession has been
dealing with convicts is most likely to stand in need of and heed."

Captain Macpherson frowned, stumped the other way, then looked once more
aloft, and, by the exercise of that ingenuity peculiarly his own, found
new tasks for the sailors. Aboard any ship, especially a ship of this
character, it was his theory and practice that discipline could not be
too strictly maintained and the men on the _Lord Nelson_ knew no idle
moments.

"May I go, too?"

The child with the golden hair desisted in her occupation of watching
the flying-fish and other _real_-winged creatures, and, leaving the
rail, walked toward the group that was about to follow Mr. Gillett. She
was a very beautiful girl of ten or eleven; slim, delicately fashioned,
of a definite proud type. But although she held herself erect, in an
unconscious patrician sort of way, there was, also, about her something
wayward and different from the conventional, aristocratic set. The
disordered golden hair proclaimed it, while in the depths of the fine,
blue eyes manifold changing lights told of a capriciousness out of the
pale of a stiffly decorous and well-contained caste.

"May I go, too, aunt?" she repeated.

"Why, of course!" interposed a blase, cynical-appearing young man who
had just emerged from the cabin. "Don't know where she wants to go, or
what she wants to do; but don't say she can't; really you mustn't, now."

"Well, since you insist on spoiling her, Lord Ronsdale--"

He twisted a blond mustache which adorned a handsome face that bore many
marks of what is called experience of the world. "Couldn't do that!
Besides, Jocelyn and I are great chums, don't you know. We're going to
be married some day when she grows up."