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Then followed a strangling sob and the thud of heavy blows "Rodd, I can't stand this," whispered Hartnoll. I answered, "Nor I;" and together we made a spring for it and hurled into the passage, bearing back the woman who tried to hold the door against us. At the rush of our footsteps the virago dropped Meliar-Ann and fled down the passage towards a doorway, through which she burst, screaming.
So much and also that her own name was Meliar-Ann and her mother kept a sailor's lodging-house the small creature told us, still trotting by our side, until we found ourselves walking alongside a low wall over which we inhaled strong odours of the sea and of longshore sewage, and spied the riding-lights of the harbour looming through the fog.
A few of the crowd still lingered on the quay's edge, and it has since occurred to me to wonder that, as Hartnoll and I turned and ascended the steps, no violence was offered to us. We had come out to flaunt our small selves in his Majesty's uniform. Here, if ever, was proof of the respect it commanded; and we failed to notice it. Meliar-Ann had disappeared.
A lamp burned foggily at the head of the steps by which we descended to the waterside, and looking up I saw the child who had called herself Meliar-Ann standing in the circle of it, and gazing down upon the embarkation with dark unemotional eyes. Hartnoll spied her too, and waved his recovered dirk triumphantly. She paid him no heed at all.
Hartnoll and I squeezed our bodies back in the foggy shadow, and I heard a voice ask, "Is that Smithers?" To this Meliar-Ann made some response which I could not catch, but its effect was to make the voice a woman's break out in a string of querulous cursings. Eh, Rector what's that you say? "Drat the child!" it said, then, or words to that effect.
"There's a press out; or elst they're expecting one," she said. I heard a distant clock chiming for midnight as we followed her along this row of houses. Meliar-Ann started suddenly in front of us, spreading her arms out, then slowly backwards, and so motioning us to halt under the shadow of the wall.
We must have passed a score of taverns at least; of that I have assured myself by many a later exploration of Portsmouth: and in those days a Portsmouth tavern never closed day or night, save for the death of a landlord, nor always for that. But to-night a murmur at most distinguished it from the other houses in the street. Meliar-Ann solved the puzzle for us, with a wise nod of the head
"Bothering here at this time of night, when Bill's been a-bed this hour and a half, and time you was the same." To this Meliar-Ann made, and audibly, the briefest possible answer. She said, "You lie." "Strike me dead!" replied the woman's voice in the doorway. "You lie," repeated the child; "and you'd best belay to that.
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