“I am afraid your friend Miss Weston is romantic,” he said stiffly.  “Am I keeping you too long from the dance?”

“Oh, no,” said Bobby, comfortably.  “I’ve got the next with Andy Black.  He’ll never think to look up here.  But are you quite sure I’m not getting on your nerves?”

“I am quite sure you are a most awfully charming girl,” Percival exclaimed with sudden warmth.  “As a matter of fact, I—­I like you tremendously.”

“That’s nice,” said Bobby, “because, you see, I like you!”

There was no reason why her avowal should have been regarded as more serious than his own.  But he took alarm instantly.

“You won’t mind my telling you a few things for your own good, will you?” he asked, taking refuge in the safe role of mentor.

“Not a bit,” said Bobby; “fire away.”

She listened for five minutes to his dissertation on the impropriety of young ladies playing poker in the smoking-room, then she became restive.

“Isn’t it funny,” she said by way of changing the subject, “that yesterday was Friday, and to-morrow is going to be Saturday, and to-day isn’t anything?”

“But it is something.  It’s a day I shall remember.”

Percival was drifting again, and he knew it, but there was that in the bewitching face upturned to his that demoralized him.

“No,” said Bobby, “it’s the day that never was.  We just picked it up out of the sea, and we are going to drop it back again.  Whatever happens to-day doesn’t count.”

“Why?”

“Because by to-morrow, you see, to-day never will have been.”

“Deuced clever idea that, I call it.  Never thought of it.  Suppose we celebrate by way of doing something that we wouldn’t do if it counted.”

Bobby clapped her hands.  “What shall it be?”

“Well, suppose for the rest of the day you consider me the person you quite like best in the world.”

She considered it.

“All right.  I don’t mind for the rest of the day.  And you promise to forget all those girls over in England, and pretend that I am the nicest girl you know?”

“I promise,” said Percival.

When the second gong for dinner sounded, the two white-clad figures were still leaning on the railing in the secluded angle made by two life-boats.  The color had gone from the sky, but every moment the purpling waters were growing more vivid, more intense, more thrillingly alive to the mystery of the coming night.  The Honorable Percival’s cap was on Bobby’s head, and his coat was about her shoulders.  As to himself, he seemed strangely indifferent to the tumbled state of his wind-blown hair and the shocking informality of his shirt-sleeves.  It was quite evident that for the time being, at least, he had thrown discretion to the winds, and was sailing away from his memories at the rate of sixteen knots an hour.