‘You have, I assure you, Mr Hold, no cause whatever for irritation,’ he said smoothly: ‘I mean—to use your own expression, which I willingly adopt—fairly by you. I neither repudiate nor ignore our tacit compact. It is my dearest wish that my son should become the husband of the exemplary young lady in whose prosperity you interest yourself.’ Hold gave a growl such as a bear, suddenly mollified by the gift of a glittering slice of toothsome honeycomb, might be expected to emit. His distrustful eye ranged over the baronet’s plausible face, as though to test the sincerity of the assurance which had just been given. ‘We’re in the same boat,’ he said, in a tone that, if dogged, was less surly than before. ‘Our pumpkins, I guess, ought to go to the same market, they ought. But fair words don’t put fresh butter into a dish of boiled batatas. I’m a British bull-dog of the game old breed,’ he added gruffly; ‘and I keep the grip, however I’m handled. Is there a likelihood of the marriage coming off soonish?’ ‘I hope so,’ returned Sir Sykes. He would have given much to have avoided the slight embarrassment which he was conscious that his manner indicated, and which was not lost upon Hold’s watchful eye. ‘No day fixed? No banns put up—stop! I forgot—you swells marry by special license of the Archbishop of Canterbury—no cake ordered; no fal-lals bespoken from the milliner; no breakfast; no orange-flowers, eh? Well, I wish to be reasonable about it, Sir Sykes, but there must be an end of this. Do the young people understand one another, or do they not?’ ‘It does not answer to _brusquer_ these things,’ returned Sir Sykes apologetically. ‘It does not answer to _what_?’ interrupted Richard, to whose nautical ears the French word sounded odder than would have done a fragment of linguafranca or a scrap of Eboe or Mandingo. ‘To be too precipitate,’ explained the baronet. ‘I have spoken to my son. He sees, I hope, the affair in a proper light. He is often in the society of Miss Willis, but—but’—— Sir Sykes wavered miserably here. All his deportment seemed to fail him before Hold’s merciless eye, the very gaze of which probed him to the quick. ‘Aren’t you captain in your own ship?’ asked the adventurer curtly. The baronet winced at the question. Captain in his own ship, in the sense that some men are commanders at home, he had never been. His own house, his own estate, had not from the first been managed in precise accordance with the views of him who owned them. But he had been a decorous captain, a captain who walked quarter-deck as solemnly as the greatest Tartar afloat, and who got lip-service and eye-service as a salve to his vanity, until quite recently.