Old Crossley had reached the stage that is known as petrified with astonishment. The Captain, being unable to open his eyes wider, dropped his lower jaw instead.
“Surely,” continued Red Shirt, removing his wide-awake, and looking steadily at his companions, “I must have changed very much indeed when two of my—”
“Brooke!” exclaimed Crossley, grasping one of the sailor’s hands.
“Charlie!” gasped the Captain, seizing the other hand.
What they all said after reaching this point it is neither easy nor necessary to record. Perhaps it may be as well to leave it to the reader’s vivid imagination. Suffice it to say, that our hero irritated the Captain no longer by his callous indifference to coincidences. In the midst of the confusion of hurried question and short reply, he pulled them up with the sudden query anxiously put—
“But now, what of my mother?”
“Well—excellently well in health, my boy,” said Crossley, “but woefully low in spirits about yourself—Charlie. Yet nothing will induce her to entertain the idea that you have been drowned. Of course we have been rather glad of this—though most of our friends, Charlie, have given you up for lost long ago. May Leather, too, has been much the same way of thinking, so she has naturally been a great comfort to your mother.”
“God bless her for that. She’s a good little girl,” said Charlie.
“Little girl,” repeated both elderly gentlemen in a breath, and bursting into a laugh. “You forget, lad,” said the Captain, “that three years or so makes a considerable change in girls of her age. She’s a tall, handsome young woman now; ay, and a good-looking one too. Almost as good-lookin’ as what my missus was about her age—an’ not unlike my little Mag in the face—the one you rescued, you remember—who is also a strappin’ lass now.”
“I’m very glad to hear they are well, Captain,” said Charlie; “and, Shank, what of—”