"O-o-o-oh!" mimicked their aunt, amused at their woebegone faces. "Do you know that we've been down here nearly four hours! If we stop much longer, you'll be `oh-ing' for your dinner, when it will be too late to get any, and how would you like that?" "Humph! I thought I was feeling a bit peckish," said the Captain, wheeling about and preparing to head the return procession home, accepting Mrs Gilmour's remarks as a command. "Come on, children, we've got our sailing directions; so let us up anchor at once, for you'll have plenty of the beach before you see the last of it. I tell you what, though, I'll do for you if you are good." "What, Captain?" cried Bob and Nellie, hanging on to his coat-tails as he stumped over the shingle by the side of their aunt, the faces of all now set homeward. "What?" "Ah, you must wait till to-morrow!" was all that they could get out of him, however, in spite of their wheedlings and coaxings as they crossed the Common, with Dick and Rover following behind; the latter being too hungry even to bark, and only able to give a faint wag of his tail now and then when especially addressed by name. "Wait till to-morrow!" CHAPTER SEVEN. A SOUTH-EASTERLY GALE. "Oh, Nell!" cried Bob to his sister the same evening, some time after dinner, which, through their explorations on the beach, was somewhat later than usual--"I do wonder what that mysterious `something' is the Captain keeps promising us for `to-morrow.' Can he be thinking of taking us for a trip on the sea in his yacht, or what?" "I wonder," was all Nellie could say in reply to her brother's remark, echoing, so to speak, his own words--"I do wonder--what he is going to do, Bob?" Their anxious curiosity, however, availed them naught; the old sailor keeping provokingly silent and being as mute as the Sphinx on the subject, in spite of their wistful looks and watchfulness. Throughout the evening the Captain only opened his lips to say to Mrs Gilmour, with whom he was playing one of those post-prandial games of cribbage which it had been his wont to indulge in before the advent of Bob and Nellie on the scene to interrupt their regular routine, "Fifteen four and two for his heels," or "I'll take three for a flush, ma'am," as the case might be. He only made use of such-like technical phraseology common to cribbage players, limiting his conversation to the game alone; without leaving a loophole for either of the impatient listeners in the comer, who were turning over picture-books and otherwise diverting themselves, equally silently, till bedtime, to get in a word edgeways. It was positively exasperating to Bob; especially as, the moment the old sailor chanced to notice one or other of the children eyeing him more attentively than usual on his looking up from the cards before him, he would smile knowingly and nod his head in the most waggish fashion.