“Let us have a private palaver about this.”

They threaded their way through the tables to the spaciousness of the Place Gambetta.  Liosha followed them with her glance till they disappeared; then she looked at me and asked breathlessly: 

“Hilary!  Do you think he means it?”

“He’s demented enough to mean anything,” said I.

“But, seriously.”  She caught my wrist, and only then did I notice that her hands were bare, her gloves reposing where she had cast them on the hillside at Etretat.  “Did he mean it?  I’d give my immortal soul to go.”

I looked into her eyes, and if I did not see stick, stark, staring craziness in them I don’t know what stick, stark, staring craziness is.

“Do you know what you’re letting yourself in for?” said I, pretending to believe in her sanity.  “Here’s a rotten old tub of a tramp—­without another woman on board, with all the inherited smells of all the animals in Noah’s Ark, including the descendants of all the cockroaches that Noah forgot to land, with a crew of Dagoes and Dutchmen, with awful food, without a bath, with a beast of an unventilated rabbit-hutch to sleep in—­a wallowing, rolling, tossing, pitching, antiquated parody of a steamer, a little trumpery cockleshell always wet, always shipping seas, always slithery, never a dry place to sit down upon, with people always standing, sixty hours at a time, without sleep, on the bridge to see that she doesn’t burst asunder and go down—­a floating—­when she does float—­a floating inferno of misery—­here it is—­I can tell you all about it—­any child in a board school could tell you—­an inferno of misery in which you would be always hungry, always sleepless, always suffering from indigestion, always wet through, always violently ill and always dirty, with your hair in ropes and your face bloused by the wind—­to say nothing of icebergs and fogs and the cargo of cotton goods catching fire, and the wheezing mediaeval boilers bursting and sending you all to glory—­”

I paused for lack of breath.  Liosha, who, elbows on table and chin on hands, had listened to me, first with amusement, then with absorbed interest, and lastly with glowing rapture, cried in a shaky voice: 

“I should love it!  I should love it!”

“But it’s lunatic,” said I.

“So much the better.”

“But the proprieties.”

She shifted her position, threw herself back in her chair, and flung out her hands towards me.

“You ought to be keeping Mrs. Jardine’s boarding-house.  What have Jaff Chayne and I to do with proprieties?  Didn’t he and I travel from Scutari to London?”

“Yes,” said I.  “But aren’t things just a little bit different now?”

It was a searching question.  Her swift change of expression from glow to defensive sombreness admitted its significance.

“Nothing is different,” she said curtly.  “Things are exactly the same.”  She bent forward and looked at me straight from beneath lowering brows.  “If you think just because he and I are good friends now there’s any difference, you’re making a great mistake.  And just you tell Barbara that.”