“They come down one night soon arter you fell overboard,” replied the old man. “Very polite they was, and they asked me to go and see ’em any time I liked. I ain’t much of a one for seeing people, but I did go one night ’bout two or three months ago, end o’ March, I think it was, to a pub wot they ’ave at Chelsea, to see whether they ’ad heard anything of ’im.”
“Ah!” interjected the listener.
“They was very short about it,” continued Ben, sourly; “the old party got that excited she could ’ardly keep still, but the young lady she said good riddance to bad rubbish, she ses. She hoped as ’ow he’d be punished.”
Flower started, and then smiled softly to himself.
“Perhaps she’s found somebody else,” he said.
Ben grunted.
“I shouldn’t wonder, she seemed very much took up with a young feller she called Arthur,” he said, slowly; “but that was the last I see of ’em; they never even offered me a drink, and though they’d ask me to go down any time I liked, they was barely civil. The young lady didn’t seem to me to want Arthur to ’ear about it.”
He stitched away resentfully, and his listener, after a fond look round his old quarters, bade him good-night and went ashore again. For a little while he walked up and down the road, pausing once to glance at the bright drawn blind in the Gibsons’ window, and then returned home. Captain Barber and his wife were at cribbage, and intent upon the game.
With the morning sun his spirits rose, and after a hurried breakfast he set off for the station and booked to Bittlesea. The little platform was bright with roses, and the air full of the sweetness of an early morning in June. He watched the long line stretching away until it was lost in a bend of the road, and thought out ways and means of obtaining a private interview with the happy bridegroom; a subject which occupied him long after the train had started, as he was benevolently anxious not to mar his friend’s happiness by a display of useless grief and temper on the part of the bride.
The wedding party left the house shortly before his arrival at the station, after a morning of excitement and suspense which had tried Messrs. Smith and Green to the utmost, both being debarred by self-imposed etiquette from those alluring liquids by which in other circumstances they would have soothed their nerves. They strolled restlessly about with Tommy, for whom they had suddenly conceived an ardent affection, and who, to do him justice, was taking fullest advantage of the fact.