"Here we are," interrupted his harassed mentor, stopping before the door of his cabin. "This is where you've got to sleep." He lifted his small charge on to the bunk. "Now then, let's get these shoes off. . . ."
The flat echoed with the voices of children and the sounds of expostulation. The Marine sentry (specially selected for the post "on account of 'im 'avin' a way with children," as the Sergeant-Major had previously explained to the First Lieutenant) drifted to and fro on his beat with a smile of ecstatic enjoyment on his faithful R.M.L.I. features. For some moments he hovered outside the Junior Watchkeeper's cabin. There were indications in the conversation drifting out through the curtained doorway that all was not well within. At length Private Phillips could contain himself no longer. "Better let me do it, sir. Bein' a married man, sir, I knows the routine, in a manner o' speakin' . . ." he said, and plunged into the fray.
"Oh, is that you, Phillips?" the relieved voice of the Junior Watchkeeper was heard to say. "I can't get the lead of this infernal rice-string—don't wriggle, Jim—it's rove so taut. . . ."
"What 'normous pyjamas," said Cornelius James, suffering himself to be robed in his night-attire. The operation was conducted with some difficulty because of the sheathed sword which the visitor had found in a corner of his host's cabin and refused thereafter to be parted from. "Have you ever killed anyone with this sword?" A blustering sea broke against the ship's side and splashed the glass of the scuttle with spray. "Hark at the waves outside! Can't I have the window open? Shall I say my prayers to you?"
"No," replied the First Lieutenant, with a little wry smile, as the shadow-fingers of the might-have-been tightened momentarily round his heart. "No, I think you'd better wait till Mummie comes." Shrill voices and peals of laughter sounded outside. "Here she is now."
He stepped outside, and met the mother of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius
James at the head of her flock.
"Here we are," she exclaimed, laughing. "But, oh, Mr. Hornby, our pyjamas are so huge!"
"So are ours," said the First Lieutenant, and stooped to gather into his arms a pathetic object whose pyjama coat of many colours almost trailed along the deck. "Cornelius James wants you to go and hear him say his prayers. . . . I will find sleeping quarters for this one."
Ten minutes later the last child had been swung into its unaccustomed sleeping quarters; the twins in adjacent cabins had ceased to hurl shrill defiance at each other; and silence brooded over the flat. By the dim light of the police-lamp Private Phillips paced noiselessly up and down on his beat, and the mother of Georgina, Jane, and Cornelius James passed softly from cabin to cabin in that gentle meditation mothers play at bedtime.
On her way aft to the after-cabin she met the Torpedo Lieutenant. "The children all want to say 'Good night' to you," she said softly. "Only don't stay long. They are so excited, and they'll never go to sleep." Of all the men on board the Torpedo Lieutenant's heart was perhaps nearest that of a child. He tiptoed into the cabin-flat and drew the curtain of the nearest cabin.