She was within a couple of miles when she shaped herself out of the rain-thickened murkiness. The Aurora was making a free wind, and every stitch of canvas was doing its work. Was yonder stranger French or English? The Admiral and Captain Acton, who were both on deck, left Captain Weaver to his own devices, sensible that they were in the hands of a shrewd, well-seasoned, practical sailor, who knew his ship better than they did. "We'll test her," said he, and the tricolour was run aloft. No flag aboard the brig was to be seen in response. The schooner was crossing the stranger's bows when the brig suddenly let fly a shotted gun at her. Whatever her nationality it was plain she was not satisfied with the show of bunting flying aboard a vessel that any practised eye could at once see was not of French paternity.,
It is certain, anyway, that about nine months after the return of the Aurora, Captain Acton, Sir William Lawrence, and Miss Lucy Acton, left Old Harbour Town, for the neighbourhood of London, where after an interval, the exact period of which being uncertain, is not of historic value enough to demand research, Old Harbour Town received the news, this time in print, in the Annual Register or La Belle Assemblée, or some such publication of the period, that Mr Walter Lawrence, late of His Majesty's Royal Navy,[Pg 454] only son of Rear-Admiral Sir William Lawrence, K.C.B., was on such a day united in the bonds of Holy Matrimony to Lucy, only daughter and co-heiress of Captain Acton, R.N. (retired).,
At about three o'clock in the afternoon the frigate fired one of her bow guns apparently at the Minorca, a stern, laconic message to her to heave to; for hours ago it was perceived that the chase was the vessel Captain Acton and the Admiral were hunting; and for hours[Pg 431] it must have been known aboard the barque that one of the pursuing ships was a frigate heavily armed, and the other a fabric perfectly familiar to every man in the Minorca, as the three-masted schooner Aurora, the property of the owner of the barque..
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