‘I mean to sail in her for all that. It’s to be done, and I’ll tell you how I mean to do it.’ And here I got up and began to pace about the room with excitement whilst I talked. ‘I can’t ship as a woman, but I can ship as a boy and as a stowaway.’ His face screwed itself up into a strange expression of mingled mirth and amazement. ‘I’ll make a smart-looking boy,’ I continued. ‘I saw a lad this morning that might well have been a girl. The sight of him put this scheme into my head. I’ll get my hair cut close and dress as you do. I’ll have a story ready; I’ll take a name, and when I’m discovered I’m just a common runaway, one of the scores of lads and grown men who every year sneak into ships and coil themselves out of sight and turn up far out at sea. And you tell me, Will, this isn’t to be done?’ ‘You’d do anything. You’d scrub Old Nick white. What wouldn’t you do for Tom?’ said he, still preserving his kind of gaping look. ‘But you’re never in earnest, Marian?’ ‘I swear by my dead father, I am, then,’ said I, confronting him and speaking in deep tones which trembled with passion, enthusiasm, and resolution. ‘You’ll get no clothes to deceive the eye with that figure of yours,’ said he. ‘If that’s the sole objection, come here to-morrow, Will.’ ‘The sole objection!’ he cried. ‘One of a score, you mean. What do you know about the sea? Oh, yes, you can give the names of things; but call yourself a stowaway, and tell me where you’re going to hide?’ ‘You shall tell me,’ said I, sitting close beside him. He ran his eyes over the room whilst he reflected, and said: ‘Here’s to be a gutted ship; keep that in mind. Down aft ’ud be out of the question; they’d have you out before you warmed the hole you hid in, and you’d be ashore packing along with a constable before the Isle of Dogs was out of sight.’ ‘Then it won’t be aft,’ said I. ‘Forward! Why, yes,’ he went on, continuing to run his eyes over the room, in his struggles to realise the inside of his ship. ‘There’s the fore-peak--a big rat-trap, full of coals, spare swabs, broom-handles and oil-cans. Could you hide down there?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What! In blackness? Midnight with a dense fog isn’t in it for blackness alongside the fore-peak with a hatch on.’ ‘What care I for blackness? I know where the fore-peak is. It’s a place right forward under the forecastle. It’ll be the place for me to hide in. You’ll be able easily to contrive to help me to drop below into it.’ ‘You’re never in earnest?’ ‘Don’t say that! I must be with Tom. I have sworn to myself to follow him, and wouldn’t it be a sure way, the only sure way, of my being with him, of my getting to the same place he’s bound to, of my ending all risks of missing him and finding that he’d been sent to another settlement which, without friends to help me, I might never be able to hear of--wouldn’t my sailing in his ship be the only sure way for him and me to keep together?’ The young fellow grew thoughtful as he listened.