“Captain Cleaver,” he said, addressing me with a very frank, straightforward face and air, “I am perfectly aware that I have done wrong, sir. But the long and short of it is, Miss Mills and I are in love with each other, and we mean to get married.”
“Why didn’t you tell me so?” I said.
He looked at me knowingly. I felt myself colour.
“Well,” said I, “anyhow, it was so confoundedly unnecessary, you know, for her to pretend to drown herself, and for you to hold her in hiding.”
“I beg your pardon—you made it rather necessary, sir—you will remember that night——”
“So unnecessary!” I thundered out in a passion.
“Where did ye hide her?” said Captain Bulstrode.
“I decline to answer that question,” replied Aiken.
And the dog kept his word, for we never succeeded in getting the truth out of him, or the girl either; though if she did not lie secret in the blackness of the after-hold, then I don’t know in what other part of the ship he could have kept her: certainly not in his own cabin, which the ship’s steward was in and out of often, nor in any of the cuddy or steerage berths.