really don't know what I
did or didn't think. I quite lost my head over it, that's the truth."

"Highly proper. Quite consistent with human experience! It's the sort
of job chaps always do lose their heads over. The question now is,
What are we going to do next?" Which meant what was Vereker going to
do next? and was understood by his hearer in that sense. He made no
answer at the moment, and Fenwick was not going to press for one.

A Newcastle collier had come in to deliver her cargo some days since,
before the wind sprang up, and the coal-carts had been passing and
repassing across the sands at low water; for there was a new moon
somewhere in the sky when she came, as thin as a sickle, clinging
tight round the business moon that saw to the spring-tides, a phantom
sphere an intrepid star was daring to go close to. This brig had not
been disappointing her backers, for wagers had been freely laid that
she would drag her moorings in the wind, and drift. Fenwick and
Vereker stopped in their walk to lean on the wooden rail above the
beach that skirted the two inclines, going either way, up which the
waggons had been a couple of hours ago scrambling over the shingle
against time, to land one more load yet while the ebb allowed it.
They could hear the yeo-yeo! of the sail-hoisters at work on the big
mainsail abaft, and wondered how on earth she was going to be got
clear with so little sea-way and the wind dead in shore. But they were
reassured by the ancient mariner with the striped shirt, whose mission
in life seemed to be to stand about and enlighten land-minds about
sea-facts. The master of yander craft had doon that much afower, and
he'd do it again. Why, he'd known him from three year old, the striped
shirt had! Which settled the matter. Then presently the clink-clink of
the windlass dragging at the anchor. They watched her in silence till,
free of her moorings, any one could have sworn she would be on shore
to a certainty. But she wasn't. She seemed mysteriously to be able to
manage for herself, and just as a berth for the night on the shingle
appeared inevitable, leaned over to the wind and crept away from the
land, triumphant.

Then, the show being over, as Fenwick and Vereker turned to look the
lateness of the hour in the face, and get home to bed, the latter
answered the question of the former, as though he had but just asked it.

"Speak to Sally. I shall have to." And then added, with an awestruck
face and bat