ely face was dashed with care. Not through fear of lead, or
steel, or wooden splinter, or a knock upon the head, or any other human
mode of encouraging humanity. He hoped to keep out of the way of these,
as even the greatest heroes do; for how could the world get on if all
its bravest men went foremost? His mind meant clearly, and with trust
in proper Providence, to remain in its present bodily surroundings, with
which it had no fault to find. Grief, however--so far as a man having
faith in his luck admits that point--certainly was making some little
hole into a heart of corky fibre. For Robin Lyth had heard last night,
when a schooner joined the fleet with letters, that Mary Anerley at last
was going to marry Harry Tanfield. He told himself over and over again
that if it were so, the fault was his own, because he had not taken
proper care about the safe dispatch of letters. Changing from ship to
ship and from sea to sea for the last two years or more, he had found
but few opportunities of writing, and even of those he had not made the
utmost. To Mary herself he had never once written, knowing well that her
father forbade it, while his letters to Flamborough had been few, and
some of those few had miscarried. For the French had a very clever knack
just now of catching the English dispatch-boats, in most of which they
found accounts of their own thrashings, as a listener catches bad news
of himself. But none of these led them to improve their conduct.

Flamborough (having felt certain that Robin could never exist without
free trade, and missing many little courtesies that flowed from his
liberal administration), was only too ready to lament his death,
without insisting on particulars. Even as a man who has foretold a very
destructive gale of wind tempers with the pride of truth the sorrow
which he ought to feel for his domestic chimney-pots (as soon as he
finds them upon his lawn), so Little Denmark, while bewailing, accepted
the loss as a compliment to its own renowned sagacity.

But Robin knew not until last night that he was made dead at
Flamborough, through the wreck of a ship which he had quitted a month
before she was cast away. And now at last he only heard that news by
means of his shipmate, Jack Anerley. Jack was a thorough-going sailor
now, easy, and childish, and full of the present, leaving the past to
cure and the future to care for itself as might be. He had promised Mr.
Mordacks and Robin Cockscroft to fin