“Never you mind,” a voice said at his side, clear and chirpy as the note of a robin. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know. It isn’t our fault. The shame is for them—not us. Cheer up, comrade.” The combined childishness and manliness of the tones made an odd impression upon Roy, the more so as they also brought a sense of something familiar. He pulled himself up slowly. One of the middies had drawn close; a pretty boy, perhaps two years Roy’s junior, with a rosy face, and any amount of pluck in it. Roy gazed hard at him, in growing bewilderment. “You’d better eat while you can. None too good fare, eh?”—with the same droll assumption of manliness. “As for these”—and he lifted his little brown manacled hands—“why, it only shows we’re Englishmen. Ain’t you proud of that? I am!” Then a pause, and a stare. “O I say! My eyes!” “I say!” echoed Roy. “If you ain’t as like as two peas——” “And you’ve a look——” “It’s Roy Baron, as I’m alive!” “And I declare it’s Will Peirce!” The two tongues went fast for three minutes. As little boys they had played together, romped together, worked mischief together, teased Molly together, and together had usually made up to her afterwards by spending their joint pennies on splendid bull’s-eyes, wherewith to comfort her wounded feelings. For nearly five years the two had not met. “We weren’t beaten in fair fight, don’t you think it,” Will asserted with his chirrupy cheerfulness. “Got caught in a trap. Damaged in a gale off Cape Finisterre, and then when ’twas as much as we could do to keep afloat, two seventy-gun French frigates bore down upon us. If she’d have answered her helm, we’d have got the best of it, in spite of all; but though we had a hard fight, ’twas no go for us. They raked us fore and aft, and we got riddled through and through, so we were bound to give in at last. I say, you set to work and eat something. We’ve a long way to go.” Roy followed the wise counsel of experienced boyhood, and did eat, feeling better for it. Also, Will’s familiar and plucky face brought a sense of something like comfort. “We’ll keep together as long as we can,” Will said. Then on again they marched, the middies and Roy simply handcuffed; the Royal Navy sailors and the merchantmen sailors chained together, two and two. The boys kept up a brave heart, at least in outward seeming, however weary and footsore they became; and Roy held out as resolutely as anyone. He seemed to himself indefinitely older than Will; though in some respects Will was more a man of the two, having fought in two or three engagements, and had one wound, besides coming in for a nice sum of prize-money some months earlier.