‘Why do you ask?’
‘You had a slightly troubled look when you came into the cabin just now.’
‘What will you think,’ said I, ‘if I tell you that I have had a warning?’
Her eyes glittered to the rounding of the brows, and her lips parted as though with a sigh of surprise. I shook my head, looking with a smile at her. ‘I see how it is. If I am candid, you will think there are two instead of one!’
‘No, no,’ she cried.
I was in the midst of telling her about the voice Crimp and I had heard when Muffin passed through the cabin, seemingly from his own berth on his way to his master’s. He held a little parcel of some kind. On arriving at the opening of the short alley or corridor that divided the after berths, he stopped, looked round, and said in his humblest manner, ‘I beg your pardon, sir, but is the bayronet in his cabin, d’ye know, sir?’
‘He’s on deck,’ I answered.
‘Thank you, sir,’ he exclaimed, and vanished.
I proceeded with my story and finished it.
‘It must have been some trick of the hearing, Mr. Monson,’ exclaimed the girl; ‘some sea-fowl winging slowly past, as you suggest, or—it is impossible to say. I can speak from experience. Often I have been alone and have heard my name called so distinctly that I have started and looked round, though there might have been nobody within a mile of me. The senses are conjurors; they are perpetually playing one tricks, and, which is very mortifying, with the simplest appliances.’