“Oh, she doesn’t want any breakfast, she says.  Is momma sick, too?  Where’s Boyne?”

The judge reported as to her mother, and Mr. Breckon, after the exchange of a silent salutation with the girl, had a gleeful moment in describing Boyne’s revolt at the steward’s notion of gruel.  “I’m glad to see you so well, Miss Kenton,” he concluded.

“I suppose I will be sick, too, if it gets rougher,” she said, and she turned from him to give a rather compendious order to the table steward.

“Well, you’ve got an appetite, Ellen,” her father ventured.

“I don’t believe I will eat anything,” she checked him, with a falling face.

Breckon came to the aid of the judge.  “If you’re not sick now, I prophesy you won’t be, Miss Kenton.  It can’t get much rougher, without doing something uncommon.”

“Is it a storm?” she asked, indifferently.

“It’s what they call half a gale, I believe.  I don’t know how they measure it.”

She smiled warily in response to his laugh, and said to her father, “Are you going up after breakfast, poppa?”

“Why, if you want to go, Ellen—­”

“Oh, I wasn’t asking for that; I am going back to Lottie.  But I should think you would like the air.  Won’t it do you good?”

“I’m all right,” said the judge, cheered by her show of concern for some one else.  “I suppose it’s rather wet on deck?” he referred himself to Breckon.

“Well, not very, if you keep to the leeward.  She doesn’t seem a very wet boat.”

“What is a wet boat” Ellen asked, without lifting her sad eyes.

“Well, really, I’m afraid it’s largely a superstition.  Passengers like to believe that some boats are less liable to ship seas—­to run into waves—­than others; but I fancy that’s to give themselves the air of old travellers.”

She let the matter lapse so entirely that he supposed she had forgotten it in all its bearings, when she asked, “Have you been across many times?”

“Not many-four or five.”

“This is our first time,” she volunteered.

“I hope it won’t be your last.  I know you will enjoy it.”  She fell listless again, and Breckon imagined he had made a break.  “Not,” he added, with an endeavor for lightness, “that I suppose you’re going for pleasure altogether.  Women, nowadays, are above that, I understand.  They go abroad for art’s sake, and to study political economy, and history, and literature—­”

“My daughter,” the judge interposed, “will not do much in that way, I hope.”

The girl bent her head over her plate and frowned.

“Oh, then,” said Breckon, “I will believe that she’s going for purely selfish enjoyment.  I should like to be justified in making that my object by a good example.”