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‘That only makes it the more honourable. She will go through with it, whatever it costs, rather than disappoint him after he has waited so long. It is true,’ I continued, ‘that when a woman acts from a sense of honour—-‘

‘Well, when she does?’ said Mrs. Nettlepoint, for I hesitated perceptibly.

‘It is so extravagant a course that some one has to pay for it.’

‘You are very impertinent. We all have to pay for each other, all the while; and for each other’s virtues as well as vices.’

‘That’s precisely why I shall be sorry for Mr. Porterfield when she steps off the ship with her little bill. I mean with her teeth clenched.’

‘Her teeth are not in the least clenched. She is in perfect good-humour.’

‘Well, we must try and keep her so,’ I said. ‘You must take care that Jasper neglects nothing.’

I know not what reflection this innocent pleasantry of mine provoked on the good lady’s part; the upshot of them at all events was to make her say–‘Well, I never asked her to come; I’m very glad of that. It is all their own doing.’

‘Their own–you mean Jasper’s and hers?’

‘No indeed. I mean her mother’s and Mrs. Allen’s; the girl’s too of course. They put themselves upon us.’

‘Oh yes, I can testify to that. Therefore I’m glad too. We should have missed it, I think.’

‘How seriously you take it!’ Mrs. Nettlepoint exclaimed.

‘Ah, wait a few days!’ I replied, getting up to leave her.

III

The Patagonia was slow, but she was spacious and comfortable, and there was a kind of motherly decency in her long, nursing rock and her rustling, old-fashioned gait. It was as if she wished not to present herself in port with the splashed eagerness of a young creature. We were not numerous enough to squeeze each other and yet we were not too few to entertain–with that familiarity and relief which figures and objects acquire on the great bare field of the ocean, beneath the great bright glass of the sky. I had never liked the sea so much before, indeed I had never liked it at all; but now I had a revelation of how, in a midsummer mood, it could please. It was darkly and magnificently blue and imperturbably quiet–save for the great regular swell of its heart-beats, the pulse of its life, and there grew to be something so agreeable in the sense of floating there in infinite isolation and leisure that it was a positive satisfaction the Patagonia was not a racer. One had never thought of the sea as the great place of safety, but now it came over one that there is no place so safe from the land. When it does not give you trouble it takes it away–takes away letters and telegrams and newspapers and visits and duties and efforts, all the complications, all the superfluities and superstitions that we have stuffed into our terrene life. The simple absence of the post, when the particular conditions enable you to enjoy the great fact by which it is produced, becomes in itself a kind of bliss, and the clean stage of the deck shows you a play that amuses, the personal drama of the voyage, the movement and interaction, in the strong sea-light, of figures that end by representing something–something moreover of which the interest is never, even in its keenness, too great to suffer you to go to sleep. I, at any rate, dozed a great deal, lying on my rug with a French novel, and when I opened my eyes I generally saw Jasper Nettlepoint passing with his mother’s protegee on his arm. Somehow at these moments, between sleeping and waking, I had an inconsequent sense that they were a part of the French novel. Perhaps this was because I had fallen into the trick, at the start, of regarding Grace Mavis almost as a married woman, which, as every one knows, is the necessary status of the heroine of such a work. Every revolution of our engine at any rate would contribute to the effect of making her one.