At Sunwich Port, Part 3 by W.W. Jacobs

Days passed, but no word came from the missing captain, and only the / determined opposition of Kate Nugent kept her aunt from advertising in / the "Agony" columns of the London Press. Miss Nugent was quite as / desirous of secrecy in the affair as her father, and it was a source of / great annoyance to her when, in some mysterious manner, it leaked out. / In a very short time the news was common property, and Mr. Wilks, / appearing to his neighbours in an entirely new character, was besieged / for information.

His own friends were the most tiresome, their open admiration of his / lawlessness and their readiness to trace other mysterious disappearances / to his agency being particularly galling to a man whose respectability / formed his most cherished possession. Other people regarded the affair / as a joke, and he sat gazing round-eyed one evening at the Two Schooners / at the insensible figures of three men who had each had a modest / half-pint at his expense. It was a pretty conceit and well played, but / the steward, owing to the frenzied efforts of one of the sleeper whom he / had awakened with a quart pot, did not stay to admire it. He finished / up the evening at the Chequers, and after getting wet through on the way / home fell asleep in his wet clothes before the dying fire.