“Well, it’s a shame,” said Florence, “and if I ever get the chance of a dark night I’ll ram her with the Minnehaha!”

Florence’s mother, a dear little old lady who did tatting and read the Christian Herald, was always the particular target of the fortune-hunters who pursued her daughter.  It seemed such a brilliant idea to capture the mother first as the preparatory step of getting into the good graces of the heiress; and the old lady, who was one of the most guileless of her sex, never failed to fall into the trap and take the attentions all in earnest.  Comte de Souvary used to say that if you wished to find the wickedest men in Europe you had only to cast your eyes in the direction of Florence’s mother; and she would be trotted off to church and driven in automobiles and lunched in casinos by the most notorious and unprincipled scapegraces of the Old World.

Florence, who, like all heiresses, had developed a positive instinct for the men who meant her mischief, was always delighted at the repeated captures of the old lady; and it was an endless entertainment to her when her mother was induced to champion the cause of some aristocratic ne’er-do-well.

“But, Mamma,” she would say, “I hate to call your friends names, but really he’s a perfect scamp, and underneath all his fine manners he is no better than a wolf ravening for rich young lambs!”

“Oh, Florence, how can you be so uncharitable!” her mother would retort.  “If you could only hear the way he speaks of his mother and his ruined life, and how he is trying to be a better man for your sake—­”

“Always the same old story,” said Florence.  “It’s wonderful the good I do just sailing around and radiating moral influence.  The count says I ought to get a medal from the government with my profile on one side and a composite picture of my admirers on the other!  And if I do, Mamsey, I’ll give it to you to keep!”

Frank Rignold was sometimes tempted to curse the day that had ever brought him aboard the Minnehaha.  To be a silent spectator of gaieties and festivities he could not share; to be condemned to stand aloof while he saw the woman he loved petted and sought after by men of exalted position—­what could be imagined more detestable to a lover without hope, without the shadow of a claim, with nothing to look forward to except the inevitable day when a luckier fellow would carry her off before his eyes.  He moped in secret and often spent hours locked in his cabin, sitting with his face in his hands, a prey to the bitterest melancholy and dejection.  In public, however, he always bore himself unflinchingly, and was too proud a man and too innately a gentleman to allow his face to be read even by her.  It was incumbent on him, so long as he drew her pay and wore her uniform, to act in all respects the part he was cast to play; and no one could have guessed, except perhaps the girl herself, that he had any other thought save to do his duty cheerfully and well.