"He is a very impertinent old man, and why he should call here to see me when he knows that every day I am within a stone's throw of his office, I cannot tell. He'll get his head broke if he troubles you, sir.",
But soon as the east changed from darkness into a pale luminous grey, with the stars fading above the soaring haze of light as though they fled in scatterings, a sailor trotted up the forerigging of the Aurora, and shinned as high as the topgallant yard over which he flung a leg with his back against the mast, and taking the telescope that was slung upon his back in his hands, he slowly and[Pg 389] steadily directed the lenses round the girdle of brine which was now faintly stealing into a visible horizon in the west, and his silence betokened to Captain Weaver, who stood on the quarterdeck with eyes fixed upon the fellow up aloft, that nothing was in sight.,
The silence that followed was eloquent with recognition of the poor old gentleman's trouble. Lucy left her chair, and going close to the Admiral said, yet not so low but that Captain Acton overheard her: "It will not be as you say, Sir William. Indeed it must not be. So fine a character besmirched by acts into which a very bitter necessity has forced him, ought not to be found in the common garb[Pg 384] of a humble working merchant sailor, nor buried in some distant parts where he can never shine as a man of fine and heroic spirit fit to fill the highest position in the service he has left; and above all, and which is best, sir, capable of bitter regret, of deep feeling, of exerting the power by which the humbled man is alone able to struggle—I mean the power of self-regeneration.".
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