The captain got up and went out without remembering to send Dicky back into the steerage, where he belonged.
As Dicky continued to stand, cap in hand, he would certainly have boohooed right out if he had not been an officer and a gentleman. Dicky, when he remembered that, gulped down two large sobs that rose in his throat, and winked his eyes to keep the tears back. Was there ever another such unlucky fellow as he, Dicky Carew, he asked himself, dismally. There was Barham, that was just as busy with the cockroaches as he was, and yet Barham's jacket wasn't dirty nor his nose smutted, and if the captain had sent for him he would have turned up as trig as the captain himself. And how many times a week Dicky was mast-headed for untidiness, and how often had he ridden to London and back on the spanker boom for that same fault, only Dicky himself could tell.
While he was pursuing these melancholy reflections the little girl on the sofa had fixed her dark eyes on him.
"What's the matter with you?" she asked.
"I'm dirty," answered Dicky, desperately. "I tub and scrub as much as any of 'em, but the captain can't see what I am underneath, and he thinks because I'm dirty outside I'm dirty all over."
"The captain is my papa," said Miss Bright Eyes.
"I wish he was my papa," remarked Dicky, sadly, "if he'd be any easier on me."
Girls, as a rule, possessed no charm for Dicky; but this was such a very little one—not more than ten years old—that he regarded her as an infant, and rather a pretty one.
"I'm staying in Portsmouth," she continued, nursing her dolly very carefully, "with my governess and my nurse. My mamma is dead. She died only a month ago—before papa's ship got here—and I come on board nearly every day to see my papa. Sometimes, if it rains, I stay all night. I have a funny little bed made up in papa's sleeping cabin, and in the morning I get up and make his tea for him."
That story about her mamma went to Dicky's heart.