Mr. Smithson’s chief butler, a German Swiss, and a treasure of intelligence, had come down to take the domestic arrangements of the yacht into his control.  The Park Lane chef was also on board, Mr. Smithson’s steward acting as his subordinate.  This great man grumbled sorely at the smallness of his surroundings; for the most luxurious yacht was a poor substitute for the spacious kitchens and storerooms and stillrooms of the London mansion.  There was a cabin for Lady Kirkbank’s Rilboche and Lady Lesbia’s Kibble, where the two might squabble at their leisure; in a word, everything had been done that forethought could do to make the yacht as perfect a place of sojourn as any floating habitation, from Noah’s Ark to the Orient steamers, had ever been made.

It was between four and five upon a delicious July afternoon that Lady Kirkbank and her charge came on board.  The maids and the luggage had been sent a day in advance, so that everything might be in its place, and the empty boxes all stowed away, before the ladies arrived.  They had nothing to do but walk on board and fling themselves into the low luxurious chairs ready for them on the deck, a little wearied by the heat and dust of a railway journey, and with that delicious sense of languid indifference to all the cares of life which seems to be in the very atmosphere of a perfect summer afternoon.

A striped awning covered the deck, and great baskets of roses—­pink, and red, and yellow—­were placed about here and there.  Tea was ready on a low table, a swinging brass kettle hissing merrily, with an air of supreme homeliness.

Mr. Smithson had accompanied his fiancee from town, and now sat reading the Globe, and meekly waiting for his tea, while Lesbia took a languid survey of the shore and the flotilla of boats, little and big, and while Lady Kirkbank rhapsodised about the yacht, praising everything, and calling everything by a wrong name.  He was to be their guest all day, and every day.  They were to have enough of him, as Lesbia had observed to her chaperon, with a spice of discontent, not quite so delighted with the arrangement as her faithful swain.  To him the idea was rapture.

’You have contrived somehow to keep me very much at a distance hitherto,’ he told Lesbia, ’and I feel sometimes as if we were almost strangers; but a yacht is the best place in the world to bring two people together, and a week at Cowes will make us nearer to each other and more to each other than three months in London;’ and Lesbia had said nothing, inwardly revolting at the idea of becoming any nearer and dearer to this man whom she had pledged herself to marry.  She was to be his wife—­yes, some day—­and it was his desire the some day should be soon:  but in the interval her dearest privilege was the power to keep him at a distance.