Our crew hung about the decks in groups ready to spring to the first command. Iron stanchions had been fitted into the line of the rails, and boarding-nets triced up the length of the ship from just before the fore-rigging to the poop rail. Aft was a small gang of seamen stationed at each gun there, with all necessary machinery for the artillery at hand. The captain, the chief mate, and Mr. Cocker stood abreast of the wheel, looking at the brig with an occasional glance round the sea at the weather. I stepped to the side to take another view of the stranger, and I was noticing with admiration the toy-like beauty of her as she soared with ruddy sheathing to the head of a swell, with now and again a most delicate echo of the clapping and beating of her canvas stealing to us through the dark, breathless atmosphere, when I was accosted by some one at my elbow. ‘Do you think it possible, Mr. Dugdale, that if that vessel fired at our ship she could hit us, so violently rolling as she is?’ I turned. It was Mrs. Radcliffe, and with her was Miss Temple. With the exception of a ‘good morning’ or a ‘good night,’ I had never exchanged a syllable with this lady in all the time she and I had been together on shipboard. Her kind little face fluttered jerkily at me as she asked the question in a manner to remind one of the movements of the head of a hen. Miss Temple stood like a statue, swaying to the majestic perpendicular of her figure upon the rolling deck without the least visible effort to keep her balance, her dark and shining eyes fixed upon the brig. ‘Her gunners,’ said I, ‘would need to be practised marksmen, I should say, to hit us from such a tumbling platform as that yonder.’ ‘Just my opinion, as I told you, Louise,’ she exclaimed. ‘If she were to begin to fire,’ exclaimed the girl, keeping her gaze bent seawards, ‘she would be sure to hit us, though it were by chance.’ ‘Very possibly,’ said I. ‘There will be some wind soon, I think, don’t you?’ said Mrs. Radcliffe. ‘I hope so,’ I answered. ‘In that case,’ said she, ‘we shall be able to sail away and escape, shan’t we?’ ‘She will chase us,’ exclaimed Miss Temple; ‘and as she sails faster than we do, she will catch us!’ ‘Now, is that likely?’ cried Mrs. Radcliffe, with a nervous toss of her head at me. ‘Everything is possible at sea,’ said I, laughing; ‘but there is a deal in our favour, Mrs. Radcliffe: first the weather, that as good as disables that fellow at present anyway; then the coming on of the night, with every prospect of losing the brig in the darkness.’ ‘Would you advocate our running away from him?’ exclaimed Miss Temple, looking at me with a fulness and firmness that was as embarrassing and vexing in its way as an impertinent stare. ‘Oh, yes,’ said I; ‘certainly. We are a peaceful trader. It is our business to arrive in India sound in body’----