The Amstel had lost so much time in the rough weather of her first days out that she could not make it up with her old-fashioned single screw.  She was at best a ten-day boat, counting from Sandy Hook to Boulogne, and she had not been four days out when she promised to break her record for slowness.  Three days later Miss Rasmith said to Breckon, as he took the chair which her mother agilely abandoned to him beside her:  “The head steward says it will be a twelve-day trip, end our bedroom steward thinks more.  What is the consensus of opinion in the smoking-room?  Where are you going, mother?  Are you planning to leave Mr. Breckon and me alone again?  It isn’t necessary.  We couldn’t get away from each other if we tried, and all we ask—­Well, I suppose age must be indulged in its little fancies,” she called after Mrs. Rasmith.

Breckon took up the question she had asked him.  “The odds are so heavily in favor of a fifteen-days’ run that there are no takers.”

“Now you are joking again,” she said.  “I thought a sea-voyage might make you serious.”

“It has been tried before.  Besides, it’s you that I want to be serious.”

“What about?  Besides, I doubt it.”

“About Boyne.”

“Oh!  I thought you were going to say some one else.”

“No, I think that is very well settled.”

“You’ll never persuade my mother,” said Miss Rasmith, with a low, comfortable laugh.

“But if you are satisfied—­”

“She will have to resign herself?  Well, perhaps.  But why do you wish me to be serious about Boyne?”

“I have no doubt he amuses you.  But that doesn’t seem a very good reason why you should amuse yourself with him.”

“No?  Why not?”

“Well, because the poor boy is in earnest; and you’re not exactly —­contemporaries.”

“Why, how old is Boyne?” she asked, with affected surprise.

“About fifteen, I think,” said Breckon, gravely.

“And I’m but a very few months past thirty.  I don’t see the great disparity.  But he is merely a brother to me—­an elder brother—­and he gives me the best kind of advice.”

“I dare say you need it, but all the same, I am afraid you are putting ideas into his head.”

“Well, if he began it?  If he put them in mine first?”

She was evidently willing that he should go further, and create the common ground between them that grows up when one gives a reproof and the other accepts it; but Breckon, whether he thought that he had now done his duty, and need say no more, or because he was vexed with her, left the subject.

“Mrs. Rasmith says you are going to Switzerland for the rest of the summer.”

“Yes, to Montreux.  Are you going to spend it in Paris?”

“I’m going to Paris to see.  I have had some thoughts of Etretat; I have cousins there.”

“I wish that I could go to the sea-side.  But this happens to be one of the summers when nothing but mountains can save my mother’s life.  Shall you get down to Rome before you go back?”