“But, under the circumstances, have we any right to accept such valuable gifts?” asked Belle Darrin.
“Shall I have them thrown overboard, then?” queried Mr. Warden, smilingly.
“No; of course not,” replied another woman, “but I feel that these magnificent gifts should be returned.”
“How?” asked the executive officer. “This gunboat may never enter the Nung-kiang River again.”
“It begins to look,” laughed Dave, “as though the necessities of the case compel the acceptance of these visible expressions of the governor’s invisible regrets. There is no way to send the stuff back.”
It took an hour’s discussion to convince the women that they must perforce accept. That point settled, they proceeded to divide the gifts by lot.
“Where am I going to put all this plunder?” Belle asked her husband as she gathered up her own considerable share of the “expressions of regret.” “I haven’t a single piece of baggage.”
“I fear I shall have to place them in my chest, and turn them over to you when we next meet,” Dave suggested.
“And I may very likely be an old woman by that time,” sighed Belle.
At noon Dave took the bridge until four o’clock. It was just before his watch was finished that the mouth of the river was made. Two miles off shore the flagship could be seen, steaming back and forth. A quarter of a mile away a small ocean-going steamer followed a similar course.