Secondly, Miss Lavinia Graybrooke, Sir Joseph’s maiden sister.  Personally, Sir Joseph in petticoats.  If you knew one you knew the other.

Thirdly, Miss Natalie Graybrooke—­Sir Joseph’s only child.

She had inherited the personal appearance and the temperament of her mother—­dead many years since.  There had been a mixture of Negro blood and French blood in the late Lady Graybrooke’s family, settled originally in Martinique.  Natalie had her mother’s warm dusky color, her mother’s superb black hair, and her mother’s melting, lazy, lovely brown eyes.  At fifteen years of age (dating from her last birthday) she possessed the development of the bosom and limbs which in England is rarely attained before twenty.  Everything about the girl—­except her little rosy ears—­was on a grand Amazonian scale.  Her shapely hand was long and large; her supple waist was the waist of a woman.  The indolent grace of all her movements had its motive power in an almost masculine firmness of action and profusion of physical resource.  This remarkable bodily development was far from being accompanied by any corresponding development of character.  Natalie’s manner was the gentle, innocent manner of a young girl.  She had her father’s sweet temper ingrafted on her mother’s variable Southern nature.  She moved like a goddess, and she laughed like a child.  Signs of maturing too rapidly—­of outgrowing her strength, as the phrase went—­had made their appearance in Sir Joseph’s daughter during the spring.  The family doctor had suggested a sea-voyage, as a wise manner of employing the fine summer months.  Richard Turlington’s yacht was placed at her disposal, with Richard Turlington himself included as one of the fixtures of the vessel.  With her father and her aunt to keep up round her the atmosphere of home—­with Cousin Launcelot (more commonly known as “Launce”) to carry out, if necessary, the medical treatment prescribed by superior authority on shore—­the lovely invalid embarked on her summer cruise, and sprang up into a new existence in the life-giving breezes of the sea.  After two happy months of lazy coasting round the shores of England, all that remained of Natalie’s illness was represented by a delicious languor in her eyes, and an utter inability to devote herself to anything which took the shape of a serious occupation.  As she sat at the cabin breakfast-table that morning, in her quaintly-made sailing dress of old-fashioned nankeen—­her inbred childishness of manner contrasting delightfully with the blooming maturity of her form—­the man must have been trebly armed indeed in the modern philosophy who could have denied that the first of a woman’s rights is the right of being beautiful; and the foremost of a woman’s merits, the merit of being young!

The other two persons present at the table were the two gentlemen who have already appeared on the deck of the yacht.

“Not a breath of wind stirring!” said Richard Turlington.  “The weather has got a grudge against us.  We have drifted about four or five miles in the last eight-and-forty hours.  You will never take another cruise with me—­you must be longing to get on shore.”