"Try some of that brandy-and-water, and don't get into the doldrums. Light a cheroot—there's a box of capital ones on the locker behind you. Have patience; in a few months at farthest——"
"Months! You talk to me of patience, Tom, as if you had never seen me practise it."
"In what way?"
"Have you forgotten when I was broiling, for a pittance, on the Bonny river? how I toiled, worked, aye, slaved, and cheered myself with the thoughts of Ethel Basset, and an English home? For three years I had patience, amid adversity and illness. Heaven knows how I got through those three years, Tom."
"Just as you shall get over the three months that must pass before you reach the Mauritius after visiting Rio."
"Well, I returned, as I have told you, to find that her future home was to be elsewhere than in England; that we were to be separated, perhaps, hopelessly; that I had a rival, too, a kinsman, a protégé of her father's, a son of a certain Tom Hawkshaw, of Lincoln's Inn—a fellow without honour, honesty, money, or scruple."
"I'd like to give him a dip at the end of a deep-sea line."
"Sail, homeward-bound, on the weather-bow!" reported Morrison, one morning, a few days after this.
Morley's heart leaped, and he rushed on deck to look at the stranger—a smart bark, close-hauled, with all her starboard-tacks aboard. She was evidently a foreigner, being painted a pale pea-green.
"A Baltic craft, I take her to be," said Morrison. "Here she comes, running sharp on a wind, with a bone in her teeth."