I then returned to the schooner, where I found Miss Noble in the cabin reasoning with the trunk-maker, who had arrived, bearing with him two or three samples of the desired goods.
"He will not trust me, Mr. Portlack! and yet it is true--and too absurd--that I can make him nothing but promises of payment."
"Fourteen shillings," she answered, and she added tranquilly, with a slight smile, "To think that I should want fourteen shillings!"
I put down a sovereign; the man gave me change, shouldered the remaining boxes, and went away.
Having escorted Miss Noble to her hotel, I again returned to the schooner, which I intended should be my home until after the arrival of Captain Noble. The two sailors asked me what they should do. I advised them to ship aboard a collier and make their way to London, where they would easily find some one to advise them as to what proceedings they should take in respect of reward for the assistance they had rendered me in carrying the schooner home. Next day they found a collier wanting men, and, giving them a sovereign, I bade them farewell. I never heard of them again.
Meanwhile, I kept the negro boy on board the schooner.
We had arrived at Ramsgate on a Wednesday morning. On the afternoon of the following Tuesday I was pacing the deck of the schooner as she lay moored against the pier wall. The harbor master had not long left me. An hour we had spent together, I in talking and he in listening; for the receiver, with whom he was intimate, had dropped many hints of my story to him over a glass of whisky and water one night, and he told me he could not rest until he had heard my version of the extraordinary romance. It was a brilliant afternoon; a fresh breeze from the west swept into the harbor between the pier-heads, and the water danced in light. A few smacks, bowed down by their weight of red canvas, were endeavoring to beat out to sea. A number of wherries straining at their painters frolicked in the flashful tumble, past which was the slope of beach with galleys and small boats high and dry, and many forms of lounging boatmen. On the milk-white heights of chalk the windows of the houses glanced in silver fires, which came and went in a sort of breathing way as they blazed out and were then extinguished by the violet shadows of masses of swollen cloud majestically rolling under the sun.