"I can't," answered Dicky. "I've got to stand here until the captain comes back."
"Then I'll come to you," said Polly.
When the captain got back he found Polly sitting on the floor, with her lap full of pictures, and Dicky on the floor too, explaining them to her. The captain was quite in the cabin before Dicky heard a step. Then he jumped up, stood perfectly rigid, and blushed scarlet. It was bad enough to be caught at boyish tricks on the quarter-deck, which had sometimes happened, but to be found playing on the floor with a little girl was a reflection on his manhood. However, the captain did not seem very angry. He only said, "You may go, sir, and don't let me have to speak to you again about your personal appearance!" and Dicky fancied he saw something like a smile on Captain Sarsfield's face. Dicky said, "Yes, sir," and bowed to the captain, and then to the little girl.
"Good-by, Miss Polly," said he. It had been "Polly" and "Dicky" before the captain came in.
"Ain't you going to give me a kiss?" asked Polly in a surprised voice.
Dicky could get no redder than he was, but his hair almost stood on end, while he darted out and down the ladder, never stopping until he got to his own nook in the steerage.
"Girls are deuced bothersome—damme if they ain't," he remarked to Barham—these young gentlemen, in privacy, swearing quite mannishly, and discussing the feminine sex with a great assumption of knowingness.
Up in the cabin, the captain had said, "Polly!" in a reproving voice, and Polly had climbed up on his knee and kissed him, by way of answer.
"Do you know, papa, Dicky's mother is poor. She is the widow of an officer who was killed by that wicked Boney at the battle of the Nile"—for in those days Boney was supposed to command on sea as well as on land—"and Dicky was only ten years old, and his mother has come to Portsmouth to see him, and she can only stay a week, so Dicky won't be able to see her."
"Ah," said the captain, stroking his little daughter's hair.