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‘It will be nice and cool to-morrow, when we steam into the great ocean,’ said Miss Mavis, expressing with more vivacity than she had yet thrown into any of her utterances my own thought of half an hour before. Mrs. Nettlepoint replied that it would probably be freezing cold, and her son murmured that he would go and try the drawing-room balcony and report upon it. Just as he was turning away he said, smiling, to Miss Mavis–‘Won’t you come with me and see if it’s pleasant?’

‘Oh, well, we had better not stay all night!’ her mother exclaimed, but without moving. The girl moved, after a moment’s hesitation; she rose and accompanied Jasper into the other room. I observed that her slim tallness showed to advantage as she walked and that she looked well as she passed, with her head thrown back, into the darkness of the other part of the house. There was something rather marked, rather surprising (I scarcely knew why, for the act was simple enough) in her doing so, and perhaps it was our sense of this that held the rest of us somewhat stiffly silent as she remained away. I was waiting for Mrs. Mavis to go, so that I myself might go; and Mrs. Nettlepoint was waiting for her to go so that I might not. This doubtless made the young lady’s absence appear to us longer than it really was–it was probably very brief. Her mother moreover, I think, had a vague consciousness of embarrassment. Jasper Nettlepoint presently returned to the back drawing-room to get a glass of syrup for his companion, and he took occasion to remark that it was lovely on the balcony: one really got some air, the breeze was from that quarter. I remembered, as he went away with his tinkling tumbler, that from my hand, a few minutes before, Miss Mavis had not been willing to accept this innocent offering. A little later Mrs. Nettlepoint said–‘Well, if it’s so pleasant there we had better go ourselves.’ So we passed to the front and in the other room met the two young people coming in from the balcony. I wondered in the light of subsequent events exactly how long they had been sitting there together. (There were three or four cane chairs which had been placed there for the summer.) If it had been but five minutes, that only made subsequent events more curious. ‘We must go, mother,’ Miss Mavis immediately said; and a moment later, with a little renewal of chatter as to our general meeting on the ship, the visitors had taken leave. Jasper went down with them to the door and as soon as they had gone out Mrs. Nettlepoint exclaimed–‘Ah, but she’ll be a bore–she’ll be a bore!’

‘Not through talking too much–surely.’

‘An affectation of silence is as bad. I hate that particular pose; it’s coming up very much now; an imitation of the English, like everything else. A girl who tries to be statuesque at sea–that will act on one’s nerves!’

‘I don’t know what she tries to be, but she succeeds in being very handsome.’

‘So much the better for you. I’ll leave her to you, for I shall be shut up. I like her being placed under my “care.”‘

‘She will be under Jasper’s,’ I remarked.

‘Ah, he won’t go–I want it too much.’

‘I have an idea he will go.’

‘Why didn’t he tell me so then–when he came in?’

‘He was diverted by Miss Mavis–a beautiful unexpected girl sitting there.’

‘Diverted from his mother–trembling for his decision?’

‘She’s an old friend; it was a meeting after a long separation.’

‘Yes, such a lot of them as he knows!’ said Mrs. Nettlepoint.

‘Such a lot of them?’

‘He has so many female friends–in the most varied circles.’

‘Well, we can close round her then–for I on my side knew, or used to know, her young man.’

‘Her young man?’

‘The fiance, the intended, the one she is going out to. He can’t by the way be very young now.’