"It is the well-to-do lady who makes it hard for the poor lady," exclaimed the girl. "Two years ago I got a situation as nurse to attend an aged sick woman--she was eighty. She lived with a lady. You would think this person would have known how to treat the daughter of an officer in the navy, who was too poor to maintain her as a lady. Mr. Hardy, she used to call me Armstrong, as though I was her housemaid. I had my meals separate. When they went away for a change I was not good enough to sit in the carriage; they made me sit on the box, and the coachman, in the genial manner of the mews, asked me if I was the new maid, and if my name was Jemima. When we arrived the lady told me I must not sit with them if company came, as my presence might be objected to. I went to my bedroom, and kept in it till I was called out, and then returned to it." "It is time you cleared out," said Hardy. "The soft hearts seem to be found at sea nowadays; at all events, they are not so scarce there as fresh eggs," said he, helping himself. "Your intentions are to get abroad and seek a berth abroad. I should like to read the map of them. You have saved seven pounds odd, and you arrive in London at night, and you don't know where to go. Next day you ask your way--where? To the docks; but what docks? London, Millwall, East India, West India, and so on. You enter a forest without a compass. Now what are you going to do?" "I meant to go on board ship after ship," she answered, with spirit, "and ask anybody I saw if there was a berth for me on board." "Did you ever see a large full-rigged ship in all your life?" he inquired, smiling. "Never," she replied, emphatically. "Go to the docks, and you'll see hundreds, and there won't be one that wants you." "What is the name of your ship?" she asked. "The _York_." "Where is she going to?" "She is bound to Australia." "Is there no place for me in that ship?" she said. She looked at him piteously, though her natural grace of coquetry broke through all the same, with the planting of her hands upon her hips, and the way she side-dropped her head at him. "We carry no stewardess, no females, no passengers," he answered. "The captain is a stranger to me. No, my ship is of no use to you," he continued, after a pause. "You must call with me upon some shipping people. There may be a vacancy for a stewardess. But suppose the ship is sailing for India?" She gazed at him a little vacantly. "We shall find some means of getting abroad," he went on, running a note of cheerfulness into his voice, for he thought by the look in the girl's eyes that she was beginning to bend on signals of distress, which would be hoisted in a pearly downpour presently. "At all events, you can't be worse off than you are, and somebody says that when you are at the bottom of the wheel the next revolution must hoist you."