“To what are you alluding, dear sir?” asked Meekin, eyeing the sherry with the gaze of a fasting saint.
“The piracy of a convict brig five years ago,” replied Vickers. “The scoundrels put my poor wife and child ashore, and left them to starve. If it hadn't been for Frere—God bless him!—they would have died. They shot the pilot and a soldier—and—but it's a long story.”
“I have heard of it already,” said Meekin, sipping the sherry, which another convict servant had brought for him; “and of your gallant conduct, Captain Frere.”
“Oh, that's nothing,” said Frere, reddening. “We were all in the same boat. Poppet, have a glass of wine?”
“No,” said Sylvia, “I don't want any.”
She was staring at the strip of sunshine between the verandah and the blind, as though the bright light might enable her to remember something. “What's the matter?” asked Frere, bending over her. “I was trying to recollect, but I can't, Maurice. It is all confused. I only remember a great shore and a great sea, and two men, one of whom—that's you, dear—carried me in his arms.”
“Dear, dear,” said Mr. Meekin.
“She was quite a baby,” said Vickers, hastily, as though unwilling to admit that her illness had been the cause of her forgetfulness.
“Oh, no; I was twelve years old,” said Sylvia; “that's not a baby, you know. But I think the fever made me stupid.”
Frere, looking at her uneasily, shifted in his seat. “There, don't think about it now,” he said.