"They do you wrong, my dear Steve," said he, gravely, "who say your brains are addled with drink. Your"--his tongue stumbled over a long word which I judged to be "ratiocination"--"is admirable. Never was logician more precise. It is not a fine lady from St. James's. It will be a flower-girl from Drury Lane, and may I be eternally as drunk as I am to-night, if we do not have her into the room." With that he crossed the room, and seizing the handle suddenly swung the door open. The next instant he stepped back. The door was in a line with the wall against which my chair was placed, and besides it opened towards me so that I could not see what it was that so amazed him. "Here's the strangest flower-girl from Drury Lane that ever I saw," said he, and Lieutenant Clutterbuck turning about cried: "By all that's wonderful, it's Dick Parmiter," and a lad of fifteen years, with a red fisherman's bonnet upon his head and a blue jersey on his back, stepped hesitatingly into the room. "Well, Dick, what's the news from Scilly?" continued Clutterbuck. "And what's brought you to London? Have you come to see the king in his golden crown? Has Captain Hathaway lost his _Diodorus Siculus_ and sent you to town to buy him another? Come, out with it!" Dick shifted from one foot to another; he took his cap from his head and twisted it in his hands; and he looked from one to another of Lieutenant Clutterbuck's guests who had now crowded about the lad and were plying him with questions. But he did not answer the questions. No doubt the noise and the lights, and the presence of these glittering gentlemen confused the lad, who was more used to the lonely beaches of the islands and the companionable murmurs of the sea. At last he plucked up the courage to say, with a glance of appeal to Lieutenant Clutterbuck: "I have news to tell, but I would sooner tell it to you alone." His appeal was received with a chorus of protestations, and "Where are your manners, Dick," cried Clutterbuck, "that you tell my friends flat to their faces they cannot keep a secret?" "Are we women?" asked Mr. Macfarlane. "Out with your story," cried another. Dick Parmiter shrank back and turned his eyes towards the door, but one man shut it to and leaned his shoulders against the panels, while the others caught at the lad's hesitation as at a new game, and crowded about him as though he was some rare curiosity brought by a traveller from outlandish parts. "He shall tell his story," cried Clutterbuck. "It is two years since I was stationed at the Scilly Islands, two years since I dined in the mess-room of Star Castle with Captain Hathaway of his Majesty's Invalids, and was bored to death with his dissertations on _Diodorus Siculus_. Two years! The boy must have news of consequence. There is no doubt trouble with the cray fish, or Adam Mayle has broken the head of the collector of the Customs House----"