‘’Pears I can feel kind of a sorrow for the animal!’ He then put the handkerchief in his breast-pocket and idled down the hatch. Dick Denver was always solitary in his habits, and made a point of a cabin to himself, otherwise his conduct that night with a small lace pocket-handkerchief might have been considered somewhat out of keeping with the character of a professional black sheep. It is impossible to disguise the fact that Mr Denver, in spite of his notorious insouciance, was an impressionable man. SCENE II The ship’s saloon, fitfully lighted by the swinging lamp with a green shade, furnished a picturesque framing for the two figures it contained. Mr Dick Denver, in loose garments of spotless white, sat leaning carelessly back in one chair, with his legs resting on another; a cigar in his mouth, his hands, with the cards in them, from habit well held up, and the usual indifferent look upon his face. A great contrast was the man sitting on the other side of the long, narrow saloon table. Major Massinger, late of Her Majesty’s Service, a large, bull-necked man with eyes like a cod fish, in a white mess jacket and scarlet cummerbund, was sitting forward, burying a somewhat red face in a beaker of brandy and soda. A box of cigars and picquet markers testified to a long evening’s play, the last indeed of a series. To those who knew him, the gallant Major’s boisterous joviality would have betokened a winning night. His luck was ‘in,’ even to and beyond Dick’s bottom dollar, but this beyondness, which might have been somewhat disquieting to his opponent, was not to be gathered from Dick’s impassive face. ‘Eleven o’clock--shall we conclude?’ said the latter. ‘Not a bit of it, unless you’re afraid of the luck?’ Dick answered by an amused look and a shrug of his shoulders, but he said: ‘Won’t you disturb your wife if you stay here much longer?’ ‘D----n my wife; you’ve evidently never been spliced, or you wouldn’t be so beastly particular.’ Massinger turned as he said this to open another bottle of soda, and missed the ugly look in Dick’s half-shut eyes. ‘All serene, then,’ said the latter--‘guess I owe you twelve hundred and fifty dollars; well, now, I’ll play you double or quits, the best of three games.’ ‘What’s that in pounds? Two fifty, isn’t it? Very good! Go ahead, my sportsman; double or quits, five hundred or nothing.’ Dick shuffled the cards and cut them; a breeze stole in at the open skylight, and sighed fitfully through the saloon, and as it died away, his sharp ears caught the ‘frou frou’ of a silk dress descending the hatch.