‘They are trying, are they not?’ This with a gush of confidence and a little air of being weary of the great ones of the earth.

Mrs. Macdougal made several further efforts to induce Done to allow himself to be lionized by the first-class passengers, who, to escape for a time the boredom of a long, dull voyage, were eager to make a pet of the interesting and mysterious hero; but Jim’s moroseness deepened under the attacks, and at length he escaped with only a glance of almost maidenly coyness whenever circumstances threw him in the lady’s way.

But Lucy Woodrow was not to be denied; she had been forced into the current of his life, and he would make no effective fight against her.  After a few days her pale face, animated with an expression of pathetic appeal, obtruded itself upon his meditations.  He surprised himself mapping out a pleasant and beautiful future for her, or dwelling upon her misfortunes with a tender regret, and at such times took refuge from his thoughts in sudden action, shaking this folly off with fierce impatience, heaping abusive epithets upon his own head, arraigning himself as a drivelling sentimentalist; and what shame could equal that of a puling sentimentality?

After all, this girl stood for everything he had learned to despise and hate.  To her the conventions behind which society shields itself, its shams and its bunkum, were sacred.  He was convinced that had she known the whole truth as Chisley knew it, she must have ranged herself with his enemies.  He admitted that he had been guilty of an impertinent interference in her private affairs when he plucked her from the sea, but did it follow that he need worry himself further about the young woman?  Certainly not!  That point being settled, he could return to his dreams of the Promised Land, the land of liberty, only to find the fair face obscuring his fine visions, or to be interrupted by the girl herself, who sometimes took refuge near him from the importunities of the male blonde, but more often sought him out to satisfy the new interest his morbid and peculiar character and, it must be admitted, his cold, good looks had created in her breast.

At her approach Done felt the stir of a novel exultation in his traitorous flesh.  To be sure, he had woven romances for himself, but his heroines were always of a type totally different to Lucy Woodrow.  They were strong, dark-eyed, imperious creatures, who espoused all his beliefs and echoed his defiance of the world.  What sense of humour had as yet found place in his nature was exercised to the full at the expense of the lackadaisical lover in life and in fiction, and now he felt there was something absurdly pensive in this phenomenon of his own.  He satisfied himself that he was not in love with Lucy, but here were the marked characteristics of the fond and fatuous hero—­the obtruding face of the beloved, idealized and transfused with a sickly pathos; the premonitory tremblings; the recurrence of thoughts of the fair.  It was all in defiance of his philosophy—­an insult to his manhood.  Like many very young men, Done was extremely jealous of the honour of his manhood.  It is the pride of a new possession.