“It seems to me that I, too, remember such a one,” said she, dreamily. “Mais non, je m’y perds.  Yet, for all that, I shall not find the New York avenues lined with them.”

“No; the houses there are palaces.”

“I suppose, then, I am to live in a palace,” she answered, with a light tinkling laugh.  “That is fine; but one may miss the verandas, all the whiteness and coolness.  How one must feel the roof!”

“Roofs should be screens, and not prisons, not shells, you think?” said Mr. Raleigh.

“At home,” she replied, “our houses are, so to say, parasols; in those cities they must be iron shrouds. Ainsi soit il!” she added, and shrugged her shoulders like a little fatalist.

“You must not take it with such desperation; perhaps you will not be obliged to wear the shroud.”

“Not long, to be sure, at first.  We go to freeze in the country, a place with distant hills of blue ice, my old nurse told me,—­old Ursule.  Oh, Sir, she was drowned!  I saw the very wave that swept her off!”

“That was your servant?”

“Yes.”

“Then, perhaps, I have some good news for you.  She was tall and large?”

“Oui.”

“Her name was Ursule?”

“Oui! je dis que oui!”

Mr. Raleigh laughed at her eagerness.  “She is below, then,” he said,—­“not drowned.  There is Reynolds.  Mr. Reynolds, will you take this young lady to her servant, Ursule, the woman you rescued?”

And Mademoiselle Le Blanc disappeared under that gentleman’s escort.

The ordinary restraints of social life not obtaining so much on board ship as elsewhere, Mr. Raleigh saw his acquaintance with the pale young stranger fast ripening into friendliness.  It was an agreeable variation from the monotonous routine of his voyage, and he felt that it was not unpleasant to her.  Indeed, with that childlike simplicity that was her first characteristic, she never saw him without seeking him, and every morning and every evening it became their habit to pace the deck together.  Sunrise and twilight began to be the hours with which he associated her; and it was strange, that, coming, as she did, out of the full blaze of tropical suns, she yet seemed a creature that had taken life from the fresh, cool, dewy hours, and that must fairly dissolve beneath the sky of noon.  She puzzled him, too, and he found singular contradictions in her:  to-night, sweetness itself,—­to-morrow, petulant as a spoiled child.  She had all a child’s curiosity, too; and he amused himself by seeing, at one time, with what novelty his adventures struck her, when, at another, he would have fancied she had always held Taj and Himmaleh in her garden.  Now and then, excited, perhaps, by emulation and wonder, her natural joyousness broke through the usually sad and quiet demeanor; and she related to him, with dramatic abandon, scenes of her gay and innocent island-life, so that