For a few minutes she wrote in silence, while he looked fixedly out to sea. "What name am I to write, please?" she asked presently. "Oh, Salt--George Salt," he replied in a matter-of-fact voice, and without turning his head. "Is it 'Mr Salt,' or 'Captain,' or----?" "Just 'Mr,' please. And"--his voice fell a little flat in spite of himself, but he did not meet her eyes--"and would it be too much if I asked you to mention the circumstances under which we met?" She bent a little lower over the paper in a shame she could not then define. "I will not fail to let my father know how heroic you have been, and to what an extent we are indebted to you," she replied dispassionately. "Thank you." Suddenly he turned with an arresting gesture, and impulsive speech trembled on his tongue. But the sophistries of explanation, apology, self-extenuation, were foreign to the nature of this strong keen-featured man, whose grey and not unkindly eyes had gained their tranquil depth from long intercourse with sea and sky--those two masters who teach the larger things of life. The words were never spoken, his arm fell down again, and the moment passed. "I have never," he was known to say with quiet emphasis in later years, "regretted silence. I have never given way to an impulse and spoken hastily without regretting speech." The London evening papers were being cried in the streets of the old Cinque Port as "George Salt" walked to the station a few hours later. A general election was drawing to its desultory close, but the results seemed to excite curiously little interest among the well-dressed, leisured class that filled the promenades. It was a longer sweep of the pendulum than had ever been anticipated in the days when politics were more or less the pastime of the rich, and the working classes neither understood nor cared to understand them--only understood that whatever else happened nothing ever came their way. The man who had been a sailor bought two papers of very different views, the _Pall Mall Gazette_ and the orthodox labour organ called _The Masses_. Neither rejoiced, but to despair _The Masses_ added a note of ingenuous surprise as it summarised the contest as a whole. This was how the matter stood: POSITION OF PARTIES AT THE DISSOLUTION Labour Members 300 Socialists 140 Liberals 112 Unionists 40 PARTY GAINS Socialist Gains 204 Moderate Labour Gains 5 Imperial Party Gains 0 POSITION OF PARTIES IN THE NEW PARLIAMENT Socialists 344 Moderate Labour Party (all groups) 179 Combined Imperial Party (Liberals and Unionists) 68 (The above returns do not include the Orkney and Shetland Islands.) Socialist majority over all possible combinations 97