Mr. Peridon was a more welcome sample of the islanders, despite an inferior pretension to accent.  He burned to be near these ladies, and he passed them but once.  His enthusiasm for Mademoiselle de Seilles was notorious.  Gratefully the compliment was acknowledged by her, in her demure fashion; with a reserve of comic intellectual contempt for the man who could not see that women, or Frenchwomen, or eminently she among them, must have their enthusiasm set springing in the breast before they can be swayed by the most violent of outer gales.  And say, that she is uprooted;—­he does but roll a log.  Mr. Peridon’s efforts to perfect himself in the French tongue touched her.

A night of May leaning on June, is little more than a deliberate wink of the eye of light.  Mr. Barmby, an exile from the ladies by reason of an addiction to tobacco, quitted the forepart of the vessel at the first greying.  Now was the cloak of night worn threadbare, and grey astir for the heralding of gold, day visibly ready to show its warmer throbs.  The gentle waves were just a stronger grey than the sky, perforce of an interfusion that shifted gradations; they were silken, in places oily grey; cold to drive the sight across their playful monotonousness for refuge on any far fisher-sail.

Miss Radnor was asleep, eyelids benignly down, lips mildly closed.  The girl’s cheeks held colour to match a dawn yet unawakened though born.  They were in a nest shading amid silks of pale blue, and there was a languid flutter beneath her chin to the catch of the morn-breeze.  Bacchanal threads astray from a disorderly front-lock of rich brown hair were alive over an eyebrow showing like a seal upon the lightest and securest of slumbers.

Mr. Barmby gazed, and devoutly.  Both the ladies were in their oblivion; the younger quite saintly; but the couple inseparably framed, elevating to behold; a reproach to the reminiscence of pipes.  He was near; and quietly the eyelids of mademoiselle lifted on him.  Her look was grave, straight, uninquiring, soon accurately perusing; an arrow of Artemis for penetration.  He went by, with the sound in the throat of a startled bush-bird taking to wing; he limped off some nail of the deck, as if that young Frenchwoman had turned the foot to a hoof.  Man could not be more guiltless, yet her look had perturbed him; nails conspired; in his vexation, he execrated tobacco.  And ask not why, where reason never was.

Nesta woke babbling on the subject she had relinquished for sleep.  Mademoiselle touched a feathery finger at her hair and hood during their silvery French chimes.

Mr. Sowerby presented the risen morning to them, with encomiums, after they had been observing every variation in it.  He spoke happily of the pleasant passage, and of the agreeable night; particularly of the excellent idea of the expedition by this long route at night; the prospect of which had disfigured him with his grimace of speculation—­apparently a sourness that did not exist.  Nesta had a singular notion, coming of a girl’s mingled observation and intuition, that the impressions upon this gentleman were in arrear, did not strike him till late.  Mademoiselle confirmed it when it was mentioned; she remembered to have noticed the same in many small things.  And it was a pointed perception.