"Are you a cousin of mine, Madame?" asked Willatopy eagerly.
"No. I am a friend, that is all. But aren't you frightfully interested?"
Willatopy considered the situation. "It would have been very nice to have had you for a cousin, Madame. A sort of white sister. But I don't want the Skipper to be my cousin. I am a Hula, and I do not love the English. Also I am hungry, and I want my food."
As a subject for the exhibition of frightful excitement, Willatopy was a complete failure. He was bored. He had talked himself tired and hungry. He wanted food and afterwards sleep. He had no use, as the Americans say, for the cousinhood of Sir John Toppys, Baronet of Wigan.
Ching turned his rude back upon the discovered scion of Toppys, but the kind-hearted Chief led him away, presented him to the greatly interested Officers' Mess—Marie declared that she was ravished at the discovery—and left him in their care.
Later that evening, when Madame had gone to her stateroom, the Captain and Chief Engineer drew together in their own quarters.
"I have been reckoning," observed Ewing, "how mysterious are the ways of Providence. There yonder in England is the great House of Toppys without an heir, unless it be old Sir John; and here in the South Seas there drops in one son of Mr. William, and maybe, as you say, lots more of them are round about. To him that hath shall be given more than he wants—or intends to keep—and to him that hath not shall be taken away the heirs in whom his heart rejoices. When Lord Topsham's son and nephews were all killed in the war the old man just withered away. His House is desolate. I am thinking that if this nigger here, whom they call Willatopy, had not been born the wrong side of the blanket he would now have been the long-lost heir of the Barony of Topsham."
"That's nowt," grunted Ching. "He and all like him are just spawn. There may, for all we know, be a brown Topy on every island in the Straits."
"Maybe aye, maybe no. It is like enough. The Idle Rich are bestially immoral in their habits. Still, if by some chance Mr. William had married this nigger's mother the boy would have been the Lord of Topsham. Ching, I am a grandly circumspectious man. I am uneasy, powerful uneasy. Why did Sir John Toppys send out the Humming Top to these waters with that foreign Madame on board of her? She's not his mistress, I am sure of that. She is a great French lady. Why did he do it? Did he know, think you, that there was a Willatopy here?"