‘Likely as not, sir. I shall think so for sartin if they don’t shorten sail on reading that bunting up there. A stranger ’ud be willing enough to speak us. Why not? ’Tis understandable that Fidler should have kept his rags small in the face of the muck that was crawling in the nor’rad this morning. _He’s_ got nothen to chase, and was always a careful man, so I’ve heard, and I tell ye, sir,’ said he in a subdued way, speaking with his eyes fixed on Miss Jennings, who stood close with a white face, ‘that the sight of his easy canvas is almost the same to me as seeing of her ladyship a sitting there,’ levelling his hairy finger at the yacht, ‘for, fond as she was of the water, let anything of a breeze come and she was always for having Sir Wilfrid reduce sail.’ He put the glass to his eye as he spoke. ‘Hillo!’ he exclaimed in an instant, ‘they’re hoisting a colour. There it goes--there it blows. Oh my precious eyes! What is it? what is it?’ he rumbled, talking to himself and working into the glass as though he would drive an eye clean through it. ‘Why, Mr. Monson,’ he bawled, ‘I’m Field Marshal the Duke o’ Wellington, sir, if she han’t hoisted Dutch colours.’ I snatched the glass from his hand, and sure enough made out the Batavian horizontal tricolour streaming from the peak signal halliards like a fragment of rainbow against the lustrous curve of the mainsail. ‘Wilfrid,’ I shouted, addressing him as he stood right aft, Miss Laura and I and the skipper being grouped a little forward of the main rigging, ‘they’ve hoisted Dutch colours. She’s a Hollander, not the “Shark!”’ and I fetched something like a breath of relief, for it was a condition of suspense that you wanted to see an end to one fashion or another as quickly as possible. He approached us slowly, took the glass from my hand in silence, and after a steady inspection turned to Finn. ‘She’s the “Shark,”’ he said, with a fierce snap in his manner that was like letting fly a pistol at the skipper. ‘Your honour thinks so?’ ‘Don’t you?’ ‘Them Dutch colours, Sir Wilfrid----’ ‘A device, a trick! What could confirm one’s suspicions more than yonder display of a foreign ensign? She’s the “Shark,” I tell you, and that colour’s a stratagem. What do you say, Charles?’ ‘I’m blest if I know what to think,’ said I. ‘If she’s the “Shark,” why has she taken it so leisurely, only just now setting her squaresail and gaff topsail though we have been in sight for a long time, crowding down upon her under a press that should awhile since have excited their suspicions? No need for them to hoist Dutch colours. If Fidler thinks he is chased, why don’t he haul his wind instead of keeping that fore-and-aft concern almost dead before it, as if he didn’t know on which side to carry his main boom?’