ing. But even while making this resolution with characteristic
infelicity he blundered into the room. Rosey looked up with a slight
start; Renshaw's animated face was changed to its former expression of
inward discontent.

"You came in so like a ghost, father," said Rosey with a slight
peevishness that was new to her. "And I thought you were in town. Don't
go, Mr. Renshaw."

But Mr. Renshaw intimated that he had already trespassed upon Miss
Nott's time, and that no doubt her father wanted to talk with her. To
his surprise and annoyance, however, Mr. Nott insisted on accompanying
him to his room, and without heeding Renshaw's cold "Goodnight,"
entered and closed the door behind him.

"P'raps," said Mr. Nott with a troubled air, "you disremember that when
you first kem here you asked me if you could hev that 'er loft that the
Frenchman had downstairs."

"No, I don't remember it," said Renshaw almost rudely. "But," he added,
after a pause, with the air of a man obliged to revive a stale and
unpleasant memory, "if I did--what about it?"

"Nuthin', only that you kin hev it to-morrow, ez that 'ere Frenchman is
movin' out," responded Nott. "I thought you was sorter keen about it
when you first kem."

"Umph! we'll talk about it to-morrow." Something in the look of wearied
perplexity with which Mr. Nott was beginning to regard his own _mal a
propos_ presence, arrested the young man's attention. "What's the
reason you didn't sell this old ship long ago, take a decent house in
the town, and bring up your daughter like a lady?" he asked, with a
sudden blunt good-humor. But even this implied blasphemy against the
habitation he worshiped did not prevent Mr. Nott from his usual
misconstruction of the question.

"I reckon, now, Rosey's got high-flown ideas of livin' in a castle with
ruins, eh?" he said cunningly.

"Haven't heard her say," returned Renshaw abruptly. "Good-night."

Firmly convinced that Rosey had been unable to conceal from Mr. Renshaw
the influence of her dreams of a castellated future with De Ferrieres,
he regained the cabin. Satisfying himself that his daughter had
retired, he sought his own couch. But not to sleep. The figure of De
Ferrieres, standing in the ship side and melting into the outer
darkness, haunted him, and compelled him in dreams to rise and follow
him through the alleys and byways of the crowded city. Again, it was a
part of his morbid suspicion that he now invested the absent man with a
p