He took the question under advisement, with a gravity suitable to its import. "Not just the same," he decided, "not as—as anxiously."
"But you'd have come?"
"Oh, yes, I'd have come."
"I thought so." Her voice was strange. There was a pause. "Do you know you're a most exasperating person? It wouldn't make any difference to you who a woman was, if she needed help, whether she was in the steerage—"
He leaped to his feet. "The baby!" he cried, "and his mother. I'd forgotten."
On the word he was gone. Little Miss Grouch looked after him, and there was a light in her eyes which no human being had ever surprised there—and which would have vastly surprised herself had she appreciated the purport of it.
In five minutes he was back, having calmly violated one of the most rigid of ship's rules, in bringing steerage passengers up to the first cabin.
"Here's the Unparalleled Urchin," he announced, "right as a trivet. Here, let's make a little camp." He pulled around a settee, established the frightened but quiet mother and the big-eyed child on it, drew up a chair for himself next to the girl and said, "Now we can wait comfortably for whatever comes."
News it was that came, in the course of half an hour. An official, the genuineness of whose relief was patent, announced that the leak was above water-line, that it was being patched, that the ship was on her way and that there was absolutely no danger, his statement being backed up by the resumed throb of the engines and the sound of many hammers on the port side. Stateroom holders in D and E, however, he added, would best arrange to remain in the saloon until morning.
So the Tyro conveyed his adoptive charges back to the steerage, and returned to his other and more precious charge. There he found Judge Enderby in attendance.