Two sailors were found to tie the ropes around their waists and stand guard below while they slowly and cautiously climbed from one swaying rung to another.

“All right?” asked Bobby, looking down over her shoulder.

“Right as rain,” called Percival, with suggestion of eagerness in his voice.

He followed her cautiously as she scrambled like a squirrel from the top of the ladder to the crow’s-nest.  Swinging through the clear sky one hundred feet above the water below, they found themselves in the sudden intimacy of a vast and magnificent solitude.  The sapphire sky met the sapphire sea in a sharply defined, unbroken line around them, while shimmers of palpitating light rose from the sparkling waters until they lost themselves in the zenith above.

“Oh, look! look!” cried Bobby, with an eager hand on Percival’s arm.  Turning, he saw the water suddenly disturbed by hundreds of curved bodies that glistened in the sunlight as they leaped together in a perfect riot of joy.

“Silly old fish, the porpoise,” he said, “always making circles in the water like that”

But the ennui expressed in his words was not reflected in his face.  Even silly old porpoises acquire an interest when one’s attention is called to them by a small and shapely hand that forgets in the enthusiasm of the moment to remove itself from one’s arm.  It was only by sharply calling to mind the haughty faces of his mother and sisters that he refrained from indiscretion.

“You don’t mind?” he asked, drawing his cigar-case from his pocket.  “Deuced clever of you, I call it, to think of coming up here.  How did you know that Black fellow wouldn’t come?”

“He’s too fat to climb,” said Bobby.  “He doesn’t even like to walk.”

“Thought he was quite keen about it from the way he walked with us every evening.  A decent chap would not intrude.”

“That’s funny!” said Bobby, with twinkling eyes.  “That’s almost exactly what he said about you, only he didn’t say intrude.”

“What did he say?”

“Butt in,” said Bobby.

The Honorable Percival suffered one of those acute revulsions that had become less frequent of late.  At such times he marveled at himself for permitting such vulgarity in his presence.

“You Americans have the most extraordinary expressions, Miss Boynton!” he said.

“How queer that sounds!”

“What?”

“Miss Boynton.  I thought you’d got to the Bobby stage.  Perhaps you’d rather make it Roberta.”

“Yes, I think I should, if I may.”

For a few seconds they dropped into silence, he puffing away at his cigar, and she gazing off to the horizon as if she had quite forgotten his presence.

“Were you ever in love?” she asked, turning on him suddenly.

“Why do you ask?” he said, scrutinizing the ash of his cigar.

“Because it’s so queer you never got married.  I thought young Englishmen with names and estates to keep up always married right away.”