An artist made the record lightning sketch of his life when in a few lines he drew the dignity, the despair, and the tenderness of the girl’s face, upon whose brow and above whose heart rested weirdly two great crimson stains flung by the sun through the coloured windows.

For one brief second her moonlit eyes looked straight into the steady grey ones; then the heavy lids sank slowly, and the faintest rose colour swept from brow to chin, causing the artist to murmur to himself, “The ice floes are breaking!” as, like the gallant gentleman he was, he tore the sketch slowly across and across.

Two little words had been whispered loud enough to reach the ears beneath the orange blossom.

“I forgive!”

When he had said it Leonie once more laid her hand upon her irate husband’s arm, and passed out into the sun to be met with the shrill cheers of the children who flung basketsful of wild flowers upon the bridal path, and the church was filled with a sound like a swarm of startled bees.

“Um—­um—­um!”

CHAPTER XXIV

  “Many waters cannot quench love;
  neither can floods drown it.”—­The Bible.

The girl kicked aside the jumble of clothes littering the cabin floor, and bending her head squatted upon the bunk, and incidentally, and quite indifferently, upon a crepe-de-Chine blouse which badly needed washing, and casually watched her mother who was scrabbling through a cabin trunk in a manner reminiscent of a terrier ratting in a hedge.

“Why on earth couldn’t you stay on deck?” demanded the mother angrily, as she lifted the transformation from her brow and heaved it on to the upper berth, thereby unashamedly exposing a head not unlike a gorse common devastated by fire.

“I can’t find that—­oh! here it is.  What a state it’s in.  D’you think the Chinese man could iron it?”

That was one of those hybrid negliges which can serve its turn as a bath gown, a bedroom wrap, or, covered with a genuine native-made tinsel shawl (bought at Teneriffe but made in Birmingham), can pass as an evening gown in the tropics.  The cabin was on one of the liners which, calling at odd places like Genoa, Naples, Algiers, etc., allows you to pick up letters brought by the mail boat to Port Said.  The inhabitants of the inner, double berthed black hole, called by courtesy a cabin, were the mother and her last unmarried daughter who lived in Surbiton.

The mother had successfully acquired a reputation as a world-wide traveller, and husbands for her numerous daughters amounting to a net total of six, by dint of travelling the latter backwards and forwards over those heartbreaking routes which suffer from two weeks or more of going without a break.

Try from Aden to Sydney with one break at Colombo, and the above long and somewhat involved paragraph will be easily understood.