“I don’t know their names,” lied Timothy. “I don’t give ’em names but numbers—one, two, three, four, etc.—just at that moment I was thinking of number seventy-nine—good morning, Mrs. Renfrew.”
Mrs. Renfrew was severe and thin, with a yellow face and hooked nose. She was a member of one of the best, if not the best, families in Bath, and it was an unfailing source of pride that she did not know the people that other people knew.
Mary watched the encounter with dancing eyes.
“Shall I have the pleasure of your company to London?” asked Mrs. Renfrew.
She invariably made a point of leaving Mary out, and indeed sustained the pleasant fiction that Mary had no existence on board the ship.
“The pleasure will be mine,” said Timothy. “I am not travelling with you to London.”
He said this so innocently that Mrs. Renfrew was in the middle of her next observation before she had any idea that the remark had an offensive interpretation.
“You seem to have had a very unfortunate experience—what do you mean?”
Happily a very hot-looking steward made his appearance at that moment and called Mrs. Renfrew away. She gathered up her charge and with a withering glance at Timothy departed.
“Take A Chance” Anderson, feeling particularly happy, was one of the first to land and strolled along the quay-side waiting within view of the gangway for Mary to disembark. Immediately above him towered the high decks of the Tigilanes—a fact of which he was reminded when, with a crash, a heavy wooden bucket dropped so close to his head that it grazed his shoulder. It was a large bucket, and, dropped from that height, might have caused him considerable physical distress.