"Dining-room suites! What have they to do with it?"
"Just everything," and Macallister sighed. "She will only have the biggest ones the doors will let in, and she has furnished a good many dining-rooms altogether. Ye will mind that we lived here and there and everywhere, while she's back in England now. Ye would not meet a better woman, but on £20 a month ye cannot buy unlimited red-velvet chairs and sideboards with looking-glasses at the back o' them."
Jacinta laughed as she rose. "You will tell Mr. Austin we are sorry we did not see him."
"I will," and Macallister stood up, too. "Perhaps ye mean it this time, and I'm a little sorry for him myself. There are men who get sent off with bands and speeches and dinners to do a smaller thing, but Mr. Austin he just slips away with his box o' dynamite and his few sailormen."
He stopped and looked hard at her a moment before he turned to Muriel. "Still, we'll have the big drum out when he brings Mr. Jefferson and the Cumbria back again, and if there's anything that can be broken left whole in this ship that night it will be no fault o' mine."
They went out and left him, but Jacinta stopped when they came upon the man he had ejected from his room, sitting on the companion stairway and smoking a very objectionable pipe. She also held a little purse concealed beneath her hand.
"You are going back with Mr. Austin to the Cumbria?" she said.
The man stood up. "In course," he said. "It's eight pound a month, all found, an' a bonus."
"Ah!" said Jacinta. "I suppose there is nothing else?"
The man appeared to ruminate over this, until a light broke in on him.