This time he walked off, and I reflected rather dolefully that the only clear result of my undertaking would probably have been to make it vivid to him that she was in love with him.  Mrs. Nettlepoint came up as she had announced, but the day was half over:  it was nearly three o’clock.  She was accompanied by her son, who established her on deck, arranged her chair and her shawls, saw she was protected from sun and wind, and for an hour was very properly attentive.  While this went on Grace Mavis was not visible, nor did she reappear during the whole afternoon.  I hadn’t observed that she had as yet been absent from the deck for so long a period.  Jasper left his mother, but came back at intervals to see how she got on, and when she asked where Miss Mavis might be answered that he hadn’t the least idea.  I sat with my friend at her particular request:  she told me she knew that if I didn’t Mrs. Peck and Mrs. Gotch would make their approach, so that I must act as a watch-dog.  She was flurried and fatigued with her migration, and I think that Grace Mavis’s choosing this occasion for retirement suggested to her a little that she had been made a fool of.  She remarked that the girl’s not being there showed her for the barbarian she only could be, and that she herself was really very good so to have put herself out; her charge was a mere bore:  that was the end of it.  I could see that my companion’s advent quickened the speculative activity of the other ladies they watched her from the opposite side of the deck, keeping their eyes fixed on her very much as the man at the wheel kept his on the course of the ship.  Mrs. Peck plainly had designs, and it was from this danger that Mrs. Nettlepoint averted her face.

“It’s just as we said,” she remarked to me as we sat there.  “It’s like the buckets in the well.  When I come up everything else goes down.”

“No, not at all everything else—­since Jasper remains here.”

“Remains?  I don’t see him.”

“He comes and goes—­it’s the same thing.”

“He goes more than he comes.  But n’en parlons plus; I haven’t gained anything.  I don’t admire the sea at all—­what is it but a magnified water-tank?  I shan’t come up again.”

“I’ve an idea she’ll stay in her cabin now,” I said.  “She tells me she has one to herself.”  Mrs. Nettlepoint replied that she might do as she liked, and I repeated to her the little conversation I had had with Jasper.

She listened with interest, but “Marry her?  Mercy!” she exclaimed.  “I like the fine freedom with which you give my son away.”

“You wouldn’t accept that?”

“Why in the world should I?”

“Then I don’t understand your position.”

“Good heavens, I have none!  It isn’t a position to be tired of the whole thing.”

“You wouldn’t accept it even in the case I put to him—­that of her believing she had been encouraged to throw over poor Porterfield?”