‘Don’t say that, Shadrach,’ she answered hastily.
‘Why?’
‘I don’t like to hear it! There’s danger at sea. I want them to be something genteel, and no danger to them. I couldn’t let them risk their lives at sea. O, I couldn’t ever, ever!’
‘Very well, dear, it shan’t be done.’
Next day, after a silence, she asked a question:
‘If they were to go with you it would make a great deal of difference, I suppose, to the profit?’
‘’Twould treble what I should get from the venture single-handed. Under my eye they would be as good as two more of myself.’
Later on she said: ‘Tell me more about this.’
‘Well, the boys are almost as clever as master-mariners in handling a craft, upon my life! There isn’t a more cranky place in the Northern Seas than about the sandbanks of this harbour, and they’ve practised here from their infancy. And they are so steady. I couldn’t get their steadiness and their trustworthiness in half a dozen men twice their age.’
‘And is it very dangerous at sea; now, too, there are rumours of war?’ she asked uneasily.