was already sufficiently pink, but he turned a rich crimson when Mrs. Cheyne kissed him on both cheeks before the assembly. Then they led her forward to show her the foc’sle, at which she wept again, and must needs go down to see Harvey’s identical bunk, and there she found the nigger cook cleaning up the stove, and he nodded as though she were someone he had expected to meet for years. They tried, two at a time, to explain the boat’s daily life to her, and she sat by the pawl-post, her gloved hands on the greasy table, laughing with trembling lips and crying with dancing eyes.
“And who’s ever to use the We’re Here after this?” said Long Jack to Tom Platt. “I feel as if she’d made a cathedral av ut all.”
“Cathedral!” sneered Tom Platt. “Oh, if it had bin even the Fish C’mmission boat instid of this ballyhoo o’ blazes. If we only hed some decency an’ order an’ side-boys when she goes over! She’ll have to climb that ladder like a hen, an’ we—we ought to be mannin’ the yards!”
“Then Harvey was not mad,” said Penn, slowly, to Cheyne.
“No, indeed—thank God,” the big millionaire replied, stooping down tenderly.
“It must be terrible to be mad. Except to lose your child, I do not know anything more terrible. But your child has come back? Let us thank God for that.”
“Hello!” cried Harvey, looking down upon them benignly from the wharf.
“I wuz mistook, Harve. I wuz mistook,” said Disko, swiftly, holding up a hand. “I wuz mistook in my jedgments.