"I say, Captain Dave, that it is well spoken, and I am sure Master Cyril will not refuse your offer."

"I will not, Captain Dave, providing that you let it be as a loan that I may perhaps some day be enabled to repay you. I feel that it would be churlish to refuse so kind an offer, and it will relieve me of the one difficulty that troubled me when the prospects in all other respects seemed so fair."

"That is right, lad, and you have taken a load off my mind. You have not acted quite fairly by us in one respect, Master Cyril!"

"How is that?" Cyril asked in surprise.

"In not telling us that you were Sir Cyril Shenstone, and in letting us put you up in an attic, and letting you go about as Nellie's escort, as if you had been but an apprentice."

Cyril laughed.

"I said that my father was Sir Aubrey Shenstone, though I own that I did not say so until I had been here some time; but the fact that he was a Baronet and not a Knight made little difference. It was a friendless lad whom you took in and gave shelter to, Captain Dave, and--it mattered not whether he was plain Cyril or Sir Cyril. I had certainly no thought of taking my title again until I entered a foreign army, and indeed it would have been a disservice to me here in London. I should have cut but a poor figure asking for work and calling myself Sir Cyril Shenstone. I should have had to enter into all sorts of explanations before anyone would have believed me, and I don't think that, even with you, I should have been so comfortable as I have been."