"You have a letter, you say, from Captain Otway," said Mr. Drysdale, partially raising his head from his hands, in which it had been buried while his son was speaking. "Where is it? Give it to Rachel--I can not see the words." The note was directed to Mr. Drysdale, whom Captain Otway personally knew, and was no doubt kindly intended to soften the blow, the return of his son under such circumstances must inflict. Although deciding that Edward Drysdale was unfit for the naval profession, he did not think that the failure of the young man's physical nerve in one of the most murderous encounters that had occurred during the war, was attributable to deficiency of true courage, and as a proof that it was not, Captain Otway mentioned that the young man had jumped overboard during half a gale of wind, and when night was falling, and saved, at much peril to himself, a seaman's life. This was the substance of the note. As soon as Rachel ceased reading, Mr. Drysdale looked deprecatingly in his friend's face and murmured, "You hear?" "Yes, William Drysdale, I do. I never doubted that your son was a good swimmer, no more than I do that coward means coward, and that all the letters in the alphabet can not spell it to mean any thing else. Come, Rachel," added the grim, unreasoning, iron-tempered veteran, "let us be gone. And God bless, and if it be possible, comfort you, old friend! Good-by! No, thank-ye, young sir!" he continued, with renewed fierceness, as Edward Drysdale snatched at his hand. "That hand was once grasped by Rodney in some such another business as the letter speaks of, when its owner did _not_ faint! It must not be touched by you!" The elder Drysdale took, not long afterward, to his bed. He had been ailing for some time; but no question that mortification at his son's failure in the profession to which he had with so much pride devoted him, helped to weaken the springs of life and accelerate his end, which took place about six months after Edward's return home. The father and son had become entirely reconciled with each other, and almost the last accents which faltered from the lips of the dying seaman, were a prayer to Bradshaw to forget and forgive what had past, and renew his sanction to the marriage of Edward and his niece. The stern man was inexorable; and his pitiless reply was, that he would a thousand times rather follow Rachel to her grave.