The dinner was exquisitely cooked, and as perfectly ordered a repast as the most fastidious could devise or desire; but very little was said, mainly, I suspect, because our thoughts were filled with the one subject we could not refer to whilst the attendants hung about us. What fell was the merest commonplace, but I noticed that whilst Wilfrid ate little he offered no objection to the frequent replenishing of his glass with champagne by the melancholy chap who stood behind him. By-and-by we found ourselves alone. ‘That is very honest port; you need not be afraid of it, Charles,’ said my cousin. ‘Do you understand gunnery?’ ‘I believe I could load a piece and point it,’ said I, smiling, ‘but beyond _that_----’ ‘Have you seen the gun on the forecastle?’ ‘Just the outline of a cannon,’ I answered, ‘under a smother of tarpaulin. What is called a Long Tom, I think.’ ‘You will have guessed the object of my mounting it?’ said he, with a frown darkening his face to one of those angry moods which would sweep athwart his mind like the deep but flitting shadows of squall clouds over a gloomy sky sullen with the complexion of storm. ‘Yes; Miss Jennings explained,’ I answered, glancing at her and meeting her eye, in which I seemed to find the faintest hint of rebuke, as though she feared I might be laughing in my sleeve. ‘What’s the calibre, Wilfrid?’ ‘Eighteen pounds,’ he answered. ‘An eighteen-pounder, eh! That should bring the “Shark’s” spars about their ears, though. Let me think: the range of an eighteen-pounder will be, at an elevation of five degrees, a little over a mile.’ ‘If,’ cried my cousin--lifting his hand as though to smite the table, then bringing his clenched fist softly down, manifestly checked in some hot impetuous impulse by the sense of the presence of the girl, who regarded him with a face as serious as though she were listening to a favourite preacher--‘if,’ he repeated, sobering his voice with the drooping of his arm, ‘we succeed in overhauling the “Shark,” and they refuse to heave her to, my purpose is to wreck her aloft, and _then_, should they show fight, to continue firing at her until I sink her.’ There was a vicious expression in his eyes as he said this, to which the peculiar indescribable trembling or quivering of the lids imparted a singular air of cunning. ‘Is the “Shark” armed, do you know?’ said I. ‘She carries a couple of small brass pieces, I believe, for purposes of signalling. Pop-guns,’ said he, contemptuously. ‘But I fancy she has an armoury of her own. Lord Winterton was constantly cruising north on shooting excursions, and it is quite likely that he let the weapons which belong to him with the yacht.’