round the handmaiden's waist, and sustained a buffet which made his head
ring.

"A man o' your age, and drunk, too," explained the damsel.

Mr. Wilks denied both charges. It appeared that he was much younger than
he looked, while, as for drink, he had forgotten the taste of it. A
question as to the reception Ann would have accorded a boyish teetotaler
remained unanswered.

In the sitting-room Mrs. Kingdom, the captain's widowed sister, put down
her crochet-work as her brother entered, and turned to him expectantly.
There was an expression of loving sympathy on her mild and rather foolish
face, and the captain stiffened at once.

"I was in the wrong," he said, harshly, as he dropped into a chair; "my
certificate has been suspended for six months, and my first officer has
been commended."

"Suspended?" gasped Mrs. Kingdom, pushing back the white streamer to the
cap which she wore in memory of the late Mr. Kingdom, and sitting
upright. You?"

"I think that's what I said," replied her brother.

Mrs. Kingdom gazed at him mournfully, and, putting her hand behind her,
began a wriggling search in her pocket for a handkerchief, with the idea
of paying a wholesome tribute of tears. She was a past-master in the art
of grief, and, pending its extraction, a docile tear hung on her eyelid
and waited. The captain eyed her preparations with silent anger.

"I am not surprised," said Mrs. Kingdom, dabbing her eyes; "I expected it
somehow. I seemed to have a warning of it. Something seemed to tell me;
I couldn't explain, but I seemed to know."

She sniffed gently, and, wiping one eye at a time, kept the disengaged
one charged with sisterly solicitude upon her brother. The captain, with
steadily rising anger, endured this game of one-eyed bo-peep for five
minutes; then he rose and, muttering strange things in his beard, stalked
upstairs to his room.

Mrs. Kingdom, thus forsaken, dried her eyes and resumed her work. The
remainder of the family were in the kitchen ministering to the wants of a
misunderstood steward, and, in return, extracting information which
should render them independent of the captain's version.

"Was it very solemn, Sam?" inquired Miss Nugent, aged nine, who was
sitting on the kitchen table.

Mr. Wilks used his hands and eyebrows to indicate the solemnity of the
occasion.

"They even made the cap'n leave off speaking," he said, in an awed voice.

"I should have liked to have been there," said