He asked abruptly, “When did this happen? Tell me, colonel, at once. It is strange—very so!”
The other looked up with surprise, while Mr Stokes stared at him with wonder, and the Irishman opened his big blue eyes wide to the full.
“I have already told you, sir,” replied Colonel Vereker very quickly. “As I told you before, it was the seventh of November—last Friday.”
“Yes; but I mean what time of the day, sir?”
“Oh, I should think about five o’clock in the afternoon. Perhaps a little later, as the sun was going down, I recollect, at the time.”
I could not restrain my astonishment at this.
“It must be the very ship I saw!” I thought to myself.
“Is the young lady slight in figure, and has she long golden-coloured hair hanging loose about her head, sir?” I eagerly asked, almost breathless in my excitement. “And, tell me too, did she have a large black Newfoundland or retriever dog by her side that same evening, sir?”
Colonel Vereker seemed even more astonished by this question of mine than I had been by his reply to Captain Applegarth the moment before.
“My brave young sir,” said he, using this somewhat grandiloquent form of addressing me, I suppose, in remembrance of the slight service I had done him by swimming with the line to the drifting boat when we picked up him and his companion. “My little Elsie is tall and slight for her age, and her hair is assuredly of a golden hue, ah, yes! like liquid sunshine; though, how you, my good young gentleman, who, to my knowledge, can never have seen her face to face in this life, can know the colour of her hair or what she is like, I must confess that passes my comprehension!”