I knew that that was the right time to speak, but I was too greedy of every moment of happiness to break in on it with the story of my troubles, so when Martin proposed to show me over the ship, away I went with him to look at the theodolites and chronometers and sextants, and sledges and skis, and the aeronautic outfit and the captive balloon, and the double-barrelled guns, and the place where they kept the petroleum and the gun cotton for blasting the ice, and the hold forward for the men’s provisions in hermetically-sealed tins, and the hold aft for the dried fish and biscuit that were the food for the Siberian dogs, and the empty cage for the dogs themselves, which had just been sent up to the Zoo to be taken care of.

Last of all he showed me his own cabin, which interested me more than anything else, being such a snug little place (though I thought I should like to tidy it up a bit), with his medical outfit, his books, his bed like a shelf, and one pretty photograph of his mother’s cottage with the roses growing over it, that I almost felt as if I would not mind going to the Antarctic myself if I could live in such comfortable quarters.

Two hours passed in this way, though they had flown like five minutes, when the cabin-boy came to say that tea was served in the saloon, and then I skipped down to it as if the ship belonged to me.  And no sooner had I screwed myself into the commander’s chair, which was fixed to the floor at the head of the narrow table, and found the tea-tray almost on my lap, than a wave of memory from our childhood came sweeping back on me, and I could not help giving way to the coquetry which lies hidden in every girl’s heart so as to find out how much Martin had been thinking of me.

“I’ll bet you anything,” I said, (I had caught Martin’s style) “you can’t remember where you and I first saw each other.”

He could—­it was in the little dimity-white room in his mother’s house with its sweet-smelling “scraas” under the sloping thatch.

“Well, you don’t remember what you were doing when we held our first conversation?”

He did—­he was standing on his hands with his feet against the wall and his inverted head close to the carpet.

“But you’ve forgotten what happened next?”

He hadn’t—­I had invited William Rufus and himself into bed, and they had sat up on either side of me.

Poor William Rufus!  I heard at last what had become of him.  He had died of distemper soon after I was sent to school.  His master had buried him in the back-garden, and, thinking I should be as sorry as he was for the loss of our comrade, he had set up a stone with an inscription in our joint names—­all of his own inditing.  It ran—­he spelled it out to me—­

“HERE LICE WILYAM ROOFUS WRECKTED
BY IZ OLE FRENS MARTIN CONRAD
AND MARY O’NEILL.”