Captain Landry sat in the saloon at the bottom of the table, Florence herself taking the head; but the other officers of the ship had a cosey messroom of their own, presided over by Frank Rignold as the officer second in rank on board.  Thus whole days might pass with no further exchange between himself and Florence than the customary good-morning when they happened to meet on deck.  Except on the business of the ship it was tacitly understood that no officer should speak to her without being first addressed.  The discipline of a man-of-war prevailed; everything went forward with stereotyped precision and formality; the officers were supposed to comport themselves with impassivity and self-effacement.  Florence had no more need of being conscious of their presence than if they had been so many automatons.

Her life and theirs offered a strange contrast.  She in her little court of idlers and merry-makers; they, the grave men who were answerable for her safety, the exponents of a rigid routine, to whom the clang of the bells brought recurring duties and the exercise of their professional knowledge.  To her, yachting was a play:  to them, a business.

“I often remark your chief engineer,” said the comte de Souvary to Florence.  “A handsome man, with an air at once sad and noble—­one of zoze extraordinary Americans who keep for their machines the ardour we Europeans lavish on the women we love—­and whose spirits when zey die turn without doubt into petrole or electricity.”

“I have known Mr. Rignold ever since I was a child,” said Florence, pleased to hear Frank praised.  “I regard him as one of my best and dearest friends.”

“The more to his credit,” said the count, astonished.  “Many in such a galere would prove themselves presumptuous and troublesome.”

“He is almost too much the other way,” said Florence, with a sigh.

“Ah, that appeals to me!” said the count.  “I should be such anozzer in his place.  Proud, silent, unobtrusive, who gives dignity to what otherwise would be a false position.”

“I came very near being his wife once,” said Florence, impelled, she hardly knew why, to make the confession.

The count was thunderstruck.

“His wife!” he exclaimed.

“Before I was rich, you know,” explained Florence.  “A million years ago it seems now, when I lived in a little town and was a nobody.”

“Anozzer romance of the Far Vest!” cried the count, to whom this term embraced the entire continent from Maine to San Francisco.

Florence was curiously capricious in her treatment of Frank Rignold.  Often she would neglect him for weeks together, and then, in a sort of revulsion, would go almost to the other extreme.  Sometimes at night, when he would be pacing the deck, she would come and take his arm and call him Frank under her breath and ask him if he still loved her; and in a manner half tender, half mocking, would play on his feelings with a deliberate enjoyment of the pain she inflicted.  Her greatest power of torment was her frankness.  She would talk over her proposals; weigh one against the other; revel in her self-analysis and solemnly ask Frank his opinion on this or that part of her character.  She talked with equal freedom of her regard for himself, and was almost brutal in confessing how hard it was to hold herself back.