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Anson turned on him. "You mean sneak!" he gasped, "you've been wearin' my Sunday clothes 'stead of your own, an' I didn't know it.",

"I guess she is the barque, sir, if the frigate's signal is right. They command a greater height aboard of her than we can, and I fancy they have twigged something fore-and-aft on the mizzen-mast.",

At half-past eleven a carriage and pair drove through the gates and stopped in front of the house, and there fell from the box a groom in a livery of brass buttons and orange facings, who posted himself opposite the hall door and with crooked knee studied the entrance with trained intentness. He was not kept waiting long. The hall door was[Pg 85] opened, and Mr Bates, the butler, appeared with a shawl and rug and the pug. A few minutes later Miss Acton and Lucy entered the carriage, one nursing her pug, the other her terrier. And when some parcels were put in they were driven away.,

It might be thought that the first person[Pg 420] in the group this gentleman's eyes fastened upon was Lucy. She would be held to appeal in her sweetness, colour, freshness, and youth to a sailor as a nosegay of lovely flowers to a lover of flowers who for months has lived forlorn in a desert of sand. But instead of looking at Lucy, the lieutenant stared at the Admiral with a very great deal of visible speculation in the screwed-up cock of his eye, till his face relaxed with these words: "Pray, sir, did you ever hear of Billy Lawrence?"

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"And what after?" enquired Lucy, observing that her father paused with an expressive look at Sir William, "I mean what after as regards Mr Lawrence?",

"It is good of your Royal Highness," she exclaimed in softly modulated, respectful tones, uttered in a measure that gave them a courtier-like dignity, "to visit me in my loneliness and distress. The great Duke of Clarence, sir"—again she curtsied—"will ever be remembered with love and pride by a kingdom whose glory lies in the deeds of her sailors, for his devotion to the sea, to those who sail it, and who bleed for their country upon it.",

It was not very long before the eleven sail of the line with their attendant frigates were swelling large, bristling, and close to the Aurora, at whose signal halliards stood two sailors who dipped to such battle-ships as the schooner passed receiving the acknowledgment of small ensigns gaff-ended, and then hauled down to be hoisted no more. The picture was full of a grandeur that borrowed majesty from the sense of the power and the empire[Pg 397] the ships symbolised. They were lordly in slow motion; they bowed to the swell as though in lofty homage to their mistress the sea; they were terrible in triple rows of cannon and by virtue of the traditional magnificent spirit, silent and concealed behind their lofty and invincible defences. It was the breakfast hour, but the people aboard the Aurora were very willing to wait to break their fast. Not a man but was fascinated by the sight and presence of that tall, majestic ship out there, with the little flag at the fore. For Nelson—the Nelson of the North, of Aboukir Bay, of Teneriffe, of St Vincent, the Nelson of a hundred wounds, the first of all sea chieftains in the history of the world, Nelson, the truest sailor, the kindest shipmate, the man of the purest and loftiest spirit of chivalry and patriotism that ever stepped the planks of a ship's decks—this great, this sublime hero, to be even greater and sublimer in his victorious and immortal death a few months later—Nelson was in her!,

"I should be uneasy in my mind in any case," said Miss Acton. "But that odious steward of the Minorca being in the business together with the unwarrantable sailing of the vessel hours before her time, fills me with dread and terror, and I cannot, brother, listen to what you say about her breakfasting and dining with a friend and going for a drive, and so forth. She would guess at our suspense and anxiety. Is our Lucy a girl to cause unnecessary pain and unhappiness, not indeed to those who love her as we do, but to the humblest creature in the world?"