"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 |