f someone would take pity on him, and would have the goodness!'

'Does he give up the ship, Susan?' inquired Florence, very pale.

'No, Miss,' returned Susan, 'I should like to see' him make so bold as
do it to my face! No, Miss, but he goes 'on about some bothering ginger
that Mr Walter was to send to Mrs Perch, and shakes his dismal head, and
says he hopes it may be coming; anyhow, he says, it can't come now in
time for the intended occasion, but may do for next, which really,' said
Miss Nipper, with aggravated scorn, 'puts me out of patience with the
man, for though I can bear a great deal, I am not a camel, neither am
I,' added Susan, after a moment's consideration, 'if I know myself, a
dromedary neither.'

'What else does he say, Susan?' inquired Florence, earnestly. 'Won't you
tell me?'

'As if I wouldn't tell you anything, Miss Floy, and everything!' said
Susan. 'Why, nothing Miss, he says that there begins to be a general
talk about the ship, and that they have never had a ship on that voyage
half so long unheard of, and that the Captain's wife was at the office
yesterday, and seemed a little put out about it, but anyone could say
that, we knew nearly that before.'

'I must visit Walter's uncle,' said Florence, hurriedly, 'before I leave
home. I will go and see him this morning. Let us walk there, directly,
Susan.

Miss Nipper having nothing to urge against the proposal, but being
perfectly acquiescent, they were soon equipped, and in the streets, and
on their way towards the little Midshipman.

The state of mind in which poor Walter had gone to Captain Cuttle's,
on the day when Brogley the broker came into possession, and when there
seemed to him to be an execution in the very steeples, was pretty much
the same as that in which Florence now took her way to Uncle Sol's; with
this difference, that Florence suffered the added pain of thinking that
she had been, perhaps, the innocent occasion of involving Walter in
peril, and all to whom he was dear, herself included, in an agony of
suspense. For the rest, uncertainty and danger seemed written upon
everything. The weathercocks on spires and housetops were mysterious
with hints of stormy wind, and pointed, like so many ghostly fingers,
out to dangerous seas, where fragments of great wrecks were drifting,
perhaps, and helpless men were rocked upon them into a sleep as deep as
the unfathomable waters. When Florence came into the City, and passed
gentlemen who