he fancied there was not an emotion in her experience hidden from his knowledge, till, all-unaware, he tripped over one reserve and another, that made her, for the moment, as mysterious a being as any of those court-ladies of ancient regimes, in whose lives there were strange lacunae, and spaces of shadow.  And a peculiarity of their intercourse was, that, let her depart in what freak or perversity she pleased, she seemed always to have a certainty of finding him in the same mood in which she had left him,—­as some bright wayward vine of Southern forests puts out a tendril to this or that enticing point, yet, winding back, will find its first support unchanged.  Shut out, as Mr. Raleigh had been, from any but the most casual female society, he found a great charm in this familiarity, and, without thinking how lately it had begun or how soon it must cease, he yielded himself to its presence.  At one hour she seemed to him an impetuous and capricious thing, for whose better protection the accident of his companionship was extremely fortunate,—­at another hour, a woman too strangely sweet to part with; and then Mr. Raleigh remembered that in all his years he had really known but two women, and one of these had not spent a week in his memory.

Mademoiselle Le Blanc came on deck, one evening, and, wrapping a soft, thick mantle round her, looked about for a minute, shaded her eyes from the sunset, meantime, with a slender, transparent hand, bowed to one, spoke to another, slipped forward and joined Mr. Raleigh, where he leaned over the ship’s side.

“Voici ma capote!” said she, before he was aware of her approach. “Ciel! qu’il fait frais!”

“We have changed our skies,” said Mr. Raleigh, looking up.

“It is not necessary that you should tell me that!” she replied.  “I shiver all the time.  I shall become a little iceberg, for the sake of floating down to melt off Martinique!”

“Warm yourself now in the sunset; such a blaze was kindled for the purpose.”

“Whenever I see a sunset, I find it to be a splendid fact, une jouissance vraie, Monsieur, to think that men can paint,—­that these shades, which are spontaneous in the heavens, and fleeting, can be rivalled by us and made permanent,—­that man is more potent than light.”

“But you are all wrong in your jouissance.”

She pouted her lip, and hung over the side in an attitude that it seemed he had seen a hundred times before.

“That sunset, with all its breadth and splendor, is contained in every pencil of light.”

She glanced up and laughed.

“Oh, yes! a part of its possibilities.  Which proves?”—­

“That color is an attribute of light and an achievement of man.”

     “Ca et la,
       Toute la journee,
     Le vent vain va
       En sa tournee,”

hummed the girl, with a careless dismissal of the subject.