“Hatch them?” suggested Miss Chubb.

“I think so,” returned Mrs. Brimmer, rising.  “Let us go below.”

The three ladies rustled away, but Miss Keene, throwing a wrap around her shoulders, lingered by the railing.  With one little hand supporting her round chin, she leaned over the darkly heaving water.  She was thinking of her brief and only interview with that lonely man whose name was now in everybody’s mouth, but who, until to-day, had been passed over by them with an unconcern equal to his own.  And yet to her refined and delicately feminine taste there appeared no reason why he should not have mingled with his fellows, and have accepted the homage from them that she was instinctively ready to give.  He seemed to her like a gentleman—­and something more.  In her limited but joyous knowledge of the world—­a knowledge gathered in the happy school-life of an orphan who but faintly remembered and never missed a parent’s care—­she knew nothing of the mysterious dominance of passion, suffering, or experience in fashioning the outward expression of men, and saw only that Mr. Hurlstone was unlike any other.  That unlikeness was fascinating.  He had said very little to her in that very brief period.  He had not talked to her with the general gallantry which she already knew her prettiness elicited.  Without knowing why, she felt there was a subtle flattery in his tacit recognition of that other self of which she, as yet, knew so little.  She could not remember what they had talked about—­nor why.  Nor was she offended that he had never spoken to her since, nor gone beyond a grave lifting of his hat to her when he passed.

CHAPTER IV.

In the fog.

By noon of the following day the coast of the Peninsula of California had been sighted to leeward.  The lower temperature of the northwest Trades had driven Mrs. Brimmer and Miss Chubb into their state-rooms to consult their wardrobes in view of an impending change from the light muslins and easy languid toilets of the Tropics.  That momentous question for the moment held all other topics in abeyance; and even Mrs. Markham and Miss Keene, though they still kept the deck, in shawls and wraps, sighed over this feminine evidence of the gentle passing of their summer holiday.  The gentlemen had already mounted their pea-jackets and overcoats, with the single exception of Senor Perkins, who, in chivalrous compliment to the elements, still bared his unfettered throat and forehead to the breeze.  The aspect of the coast, as seen from the Excelsior’s deck, seemed to bear out Mr. Banks’ sweeping indictment of the day before.  A few low, dome-like hills, yellow and treeless as sand dunes, scarcely raised themselves above the horizon.  The air, too, appeared to have taken upon itself a dry asperity; the sun shone with a hard, practical brilliancy.  Miss Keene raised her eyes to Senor Perkins with a pretty impatience that she sometimes indulged in, as one of the privileges of accepted beauty and petted youth.