that
storm. Will you think me a good enough sailor now?"

The skipper wrung his hand till he nearly wrung it off.

"Good enough! Blast my timbers! There aren't one will beat you in any
waters. Come on, sir, if so be as you wishes it; but never a stroke of
work shall you do atween my decks. I never did think as how one of your
yachting-nobs could ever be fit to lay hold of a tiller; but, hang me,
if the Club make such sailors as you it's a rare 'un! Lord a mercy! Why,
my wife was in the 'Wrestler.' I've heard her tell scores of times as
how she was almost dead when that little yacht came through a swaling
sea, that was all heaving and roaring round the wreck, and as how the
swell what owned it gave his cabin up to the womenkind, and had his
swivel guns and his handsome furniture pitched overboard, that he might
be able to carry more passengers, and fed 'em, and gave 'em champagne
all around, and treated 'em like a prince, till he ran 'em straight into
Brest Harbor. But, damn me! that ever a swell like you should--"

"Let's weigh anchor," said Bertie quietly.

And so he crossed unnoticed to Algeria, while through Europe the tidings
went that the mutilated form, crushed between iron and wood, on the
Marseilles line, was his, and that he had perished in that awful,
ink-black, sultry southern night, when the rushing trains had met,
as meet the thunder-clouds. The world thought him dead; as such the
journals recorded him, with the shameful outlines of imputed crime, to
make the death the darker; as such his name was forbidden to be uttered
at Royallieu; as such the Seraph mourned him with passionate, loving
force, refusing to the last to accredit his guilt:--and he, leaving
them in their error, was drafted into the French army under two of his
Christian names, which happily had a foreign sound--Louis Victor--and
laid aside forever his identity as Bertie Cecil.

He went at once on service in the interior, and had scarcely come in any
of the larger towns since he had joined. His only danger of recognition,
had been once when a Marshal of France, whom he had used to know well in
Paris and at the court of St. James, held an inspection of the African
troops.

Filing past the brilliant staff, he had ridden at only a few yards'
distance from his old acquaintance, and, as he saluted, had glanced
involuntarily at the face that he had seen oftentimes in the Salles
de Marechaux, and even under the roof of the regiment, ready to n