“But that is not the sea at all,” said Sheila:  “that is the storms that will wreck the boats; and how can the sea help that?  When the sea is let alone the sea is very good to us.”

Ingram laughed aloud and patted the girl’s head fondly; and Lavender, blushing a little, confessed he was beaten, and that he would never again, in Miss Mackenzie’s presence, say anything against the sea.

The King of Borva now appearing, they all went in to breakfast; and Sheila sat opposite the window, so that all the light coming in from the clear sky and the sea was reflected upon her face, and lit up every varying expression that crossed it or that shone up in the beautiful deeps of her eyes.  Lavender, his own face in shadow, could look at her from time to time, himself unseen; and as he sat in almost absolute silence, and noticed how she talked with Ingram, and what deference she paid him, and how anxious she was to please him, he began to wonder if he should ever be admitted to a like friendship with her.  It was so strange, too, that this handsome, proud-featured, proud-spirited girl should so devote herself to the amusement of a man like Ingram, and, forgetting all the court that should have been paid to a pretty woman, seem determined to persuade him that he was conferring a favor upon her by every word and look.  Of course, Lavender admitted to himself, Ingram was a very good sort of fellow—­a very good sort of fellow indeed.  If any one was in a scrape about money, Ingram would come to the rescue without a moment’s hesitation, although the salary of a clerk in the Board of Trade might have been made the excuse, by any other man, for a very justifiable refusal.  He was very clever too—­had read much, and all that kind of thing.  But he was not the sort of man you might expect to get on well with women.  Unless with very intimate friends, he was a trifle silent and reserved.  Often he was inclined to be pragmatic and sententious, and had a habit of saying unpleasantly bitter things when some careless joke was being made.  He was a little dingy in appearance; and a man who had a somewhat cold manner, who was sallow of face, who was obviously getting gray, and who was generally insignificant in appearance, was not the sort of man, one would think, to fascinate an exceptionally handsome girl, who had brains enough to know the fineness of her own face.  But here was this princess paying attentions to him such as must have driven a more impressionable man out of his senses, while Ingram sat quiet and pleased, sometimes making fun of her, and generally talking to her as if she were a child.  Sheila had chatted very pleasantly with him, Lavender, in the morning, but it was evident that her relations with Ingram were of a very different kind, such as he could not well understand.  For it was scarcely possible that she could be in love with Ingram, and yet surely the pleasure that dwelt in her expressive face when she spoke to him or listened to him was not the result of a mere friendship.