“So much the better for you.  I’ll leave her to you, for I shall be shut up.  I like her being placed under my ’care’!” my friend cried.

“She’ll be under Jasper’s,” I remarked.

“Ah he won’t go,” she wailed—­“I want it too much!”

“But I didn’t see it that way.  I have an idea he’ll go.”

“Why didn’t he tell me so then—­when he came in?”

“He was diverted by that young woman—­a beautiful unexpected girl sitting there.”

“Diverted from his mother and her fond hope?—­his mother trembling for his decision?”

“Well”—­I pieced it together—­“she’s an old friend, older than we know.  It was a meeting after a long separation.”

“Yes, such a lot of them as he does know!” Mrs. Nettlepoint sighed.

“Such a lot of them?”

“He has so many female friends—­in the most varied circles.”

“Well, we can close round her then,” I returned; “for I on my side know, or used to know, her young man.”

“Her intended?”—­she had a light of relief for this.

“The very one she’s going out to.  He can’t, by the way,” it occurred to me, “be very young now.”

“How odd it sounds—­her muddling after him!” said Mrs. Nettlepoint.

I was going to reply that it wasn’t odd if you knew Mr. Porterfield, but I reflected that that perhaps only made it odder.  I told my companion briefly who he was—­that I had met him in the old Paris days, when I believed for a fleeting hour that I could learn to paint, when I lived with the jeunesse des ecoles; and her comment on this was simply:  “Well, he had better have come out for her!”

“Perhaps so.  She looked to me as she sat there as if, she might change her mind at the last moment.”

“About her marriage?

“About sailing.  But she won’t change now.”

Jasper came back, and his mother instantly challenged him.  “Well, are you going?”

“Yes, I shall go”—­he was finally at peace about it.  “I’ve got my telegram.”

“Oh your telegram!”—­I ventured a little to jeer.

“That charming girl’s your telegram.”

He gave me a look, but in the dusk I couldn’t make out very well what it conveyed.  Then he bent over his mother, kissing her.  “My news isn’t particularly satisfactory.  I’m going for you.”

“Oh you humbug!” she replied.  But she was of course delighted.

CHAPTER II

People usually spend the first hours of a voyage in squeezing themselves into their cabins, taking their little precautions, either so excessive or so inadequate, wondering how they can pass so many days in such a hole and asking idiotic questions of the stewards, who appear in comparison rare men of the world.  My own initiations were rapid, as became an old sailor, and so, it seemed, were Miss Mavis’s, for when I mounted to the deck at the end of half an hour I