’I’m going to give you a lesson in manners, to be quits with you.  Listen, sir.  Why did you turn away so ungraciously from Mr. Skerne, while he was thanking you for having saved his brother’s life?  Now there’s where you’re too English.  Can’t you bear to be thanked?’

‘I don’t want to be thanked because I can swim,’ said Evan.

‘But it is not that.  Oh, how you trifle!’ she cried.  ’There’s nothing vexes me so much as that way you have.  Wouldn’t my eyes have sparkled if anybody had come up to me to thank me for such a thing?  I would let them know how glad I was to have done such a thing!  Doesn’t it make them happier, dear Evan?’

‘My dear Miss Jocelyn!’

‘What?’

The honest grey eyes fixed on him, narrowed their enlarged lids.  She gazed before her on the deck, saying: 

’I’m sure I can’t understand you.  I suppose it’s because I’m a girl, and I never shall till I’m a woman.  Heigho!’

A youth who is engaged in the occupation of eating his heart, cannot shine to advantage, and is as much a burden to himself as he is an enigma to others.  Evan felt this; but he could do nothing and say nothing; so he retired deeper into the folds of the Don, and remained picturesque and scarcely pleasant.

They were relieved by a summons to breakfast from below.

She brightened and laughed.  ’Now, what will you wager me, Evan, that the Countess doesn’t begin: 

“Sweet child! how does she this morning? blooming?” when she kisses me?’

Her capital imitation of his sister’s manner constrained him to join in her laugh, and he said: 

’I’ll back against that, I get three fingers from your uncle, and “Morrow, young sir!"’

Down they ran together, laughing; and, sure enough, the identical words of the respective greetings were employed, which they had to enjoy with all the discretion they could muster.

Rose went round the table to her little cousin Alec, aged seven, kissed his reluctant cheek, and sat beside him, announcing a sea appetite and great capabilities, while Evan silently broke bread.  The Count de Saldar, a diminutive tawny man, just a head and neck above the tablecloth, sat sipping chocolate and fingering dry toast, which he would now and then dip in jelly, and suck with placidity, in the intervals of a curt exchange of French with the wife of the Hon. Melville, a ringleted English lady, or of Portuguese with the Countess; who likewise sipped chocolate and fingered dry toast, and was mournfully melodious.  The Hon. Melville, as became a tall islander, carved beef, and ate of it, like a ruler of men.  Beautiful to see was the compassionate sympathy of the Countess’s face when Rose offered her plate for a portion of the world-subjugating viand, as who should say:  ’Sweet child! thou knowest not yet of sorrows, thou canst ballast thy stomach with beef!’ In any other than an heiress, she would probably have thought:  ’This is indeed a disgusting little animal, and most unfeminine conduct!’