"Couldn't sleep if I did," replied the captain, gravely. "Besides, I've got somebody coming aboard to have tea with me this afternoon."
"All right, I'm going," said Robert, reassuringly. "Nobody I know, I suppose?"
"No," said the captain. "Not exactly," he added, with a desire of being strictly accurate.
Mr. Vyner became thoughtful. The captain's reticence, coupled with the fact that he had made two or three attempts to get rid of him that afternoon, was suspicious. He wondered whether Joan Hartley was the expected guest; the captain's unwillingness to talk whenever her name came up having by no means escaped him. And once or twice the captain had, with unmistakable meaning, dropped hints as to the progress made by Mr. Saunders in horticulture and other pursuits. At the idea of this elderly mariner indulging in matrimonial schemes with which he had no sympathy, he became possessed with a spirit of vindictive emulation.
"It seems like a riddle; you've excited my curiosity," he said, as he threw himself back in the chair again and looked at the gulls wheeling lazily overhead. "Let me see whether I can guess—I'll go as soon as I have."
"'Tisn't worth guessing," said Captain Trimblett, with a touch of brusqueness.
"Don't make it too easy," pleaded Mr. Vyner. "Guess number one: a lady?"
The captain grunted.
"A widow," continued Mr. Vyner, in the slow, rapt tones of a clairvoyant. "The widow!"
"What do you mean by the widow?" demanded the aroused captain.