‘Aye, it’s nice weather,’ he answered. ‘You’re of my calling, I see. Been long ashore?’
‘I’ve not been to sea yet,’ I answered, half turning my head his way to talk to him. ‘My cousin Marian’s kindly taken me by the hand and given me a rig-out and found me a ship.’
‘Cousin Marian!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’m a cousin of hers, too. What cousin might you be?’
‘My name is Simon Marlowe,’ said I, rounding upon him and looking him full in the face. ‘My mother was Miss Marlowe. Who are you?’
I don’t believe he would have known me even then but for the sudden laugh I burst into at the sight of his face. That laugh was my own, familiar to his ear as the whistle of his boatswain’s pipe.
‘Well, I’m shot!’ he cried, with a gape of astonishment, then burst into a roar, capered up to me and, grasping me by the hands, skipped to and fro like a savage, eyeing me all over and swearing whilst he danced that he wouldn’t have known me in a hundred years; that I was the prettiest little sailor-man in the world. Twenty such things he said, then released me to clap his hands while he laughed until he was purple.
I pulled off my cap and tossed it on the sofa and sat down, copying the rolling motion of the seaman in every movement of my body.
‘You must go upstairs and shift before I can talk,’ said Will. ‘Look at your hair! I shall die of laughing.’
I ran to my bedroom, changed my clothes, dressed my hair and returned. I was secretly half wild to hear what he had to say, and had no notion of spoiling this interview by keeping him merry and roaring at my clothes. I found him looking at Tom’s miniature.
‘What a handsome chap he is!’ he exclaimed; ‘but I fear the hulk will rub some of his beauty off.’