They had dined in the saloon of the “Scotia” (how vividly I remembered it!), finishing up the evening with a dance on deck in the moonlight; and when the time came to break up, Martin had made one of his sentimental little speeches (all heart and not too much grammar), in which he said that in starting out for another siege of the South Pole he “couldn’t help thinking, with a bit of a pain under the third button of his double-breasted waistcoat, of the dear ones they were leaving behind, and of the unknown regions whither they were tending where dancing would be forgotten.”

I need not say how this moved me, being where I was, in that uncongenial company; but by some mischance I left the paper which contained it on the table in the drawing-room, and on going downstairs after breakfast next morning I found Alma stretched out in a rocking-chair before the fire in the hail, smoking a cigarette and reading the report aloud in a mock heroic tone to a number of the men, including my husband, whose fat body (he was growing corpulent) was shaking with laughter.

It was as much as I could do to control an impulse to jump down and flare out at them, but, being lightly shod, I was standing quietly in their midst before they were aware of my presence.

“Ah,” said Alma, with the sweetest and most insincere of her smiles, “we were just enjoying the beautiful account of your friend’s last night in England.”

“So I see,” I said, and, boiling with anger underneath, I quietly took the paper out of her hand between the tips of my thumb and first finger (as if the contamination of her touch had made it unclean) and carried it to the fire and burnt it.

This seemed to be the end of all things.  The tall Mr. Eastcliff went over to the open door and said: 

“Deuced fine day for a motor drive, isn’t it?”

That gentleman had hitherto shown no alacrity in establishing the truth of Alma’s excuse for the cruise on the ground of his visit to “his friend who had taken a shoot in Skye;” but now he found himself too deeply interested in the Inverness Meeting to remain longer, while the rest of the party became so absorbed in the Perth and Ayr races, salmon-fishing on the Tay, and stag-shooting in the deer-forests of Invercauld, that within a week thereafter I had said good-bye to all of them.

All save Alma.

I was returning from the hall after the departure of a group of my guests when Alma followed me to my room and said: 

“My dear, sweet girl, I want you to do me the greatest kindness.”

She had to take her mother to New York shortly; but as “that dear old dunce” was the worst of all possible sailors, it would be necessary to wait for the largest of all possible steamers, and as the largest steamers sailed from Liverpool, and Ellan was so near to that port, perhaps I would not mind . . . just for a week or two longer. . . .

What could I say?  What I did say was what I had said before, with equal weakness and indiscretion, but less than equal danger.  A word, half a word, and almost before it was spoken, Alma’s arms were about my neck and she was calling me her “dearest, sweetest, kindest friend in the world.”