CHAPTER VI.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS.

'Nan, do you see that ship out there?' said Mary Beresford.

'I saw it as I came along,' said Nan. This was the afternoon on which
she had fallen in with Singing Sal. Nan was rather tired after her long
walk, and was not inclined to show much interest in that now lessening
vessel, which was slowly sinking into the dusk of the west.

'Do you know what her name is?' said Mary Beresford, still regarding her
younger sister.

'No,' said Nan. 'I heard people say she was a man-of-war.'

'That is the _Fly-by-Night_.'

'Oh, indeed,' said Nan, with no greater interest than before.

'And Lieutenant King has just called here,' the elder sister said,
pointedly.

'Oh, indeed,' said Nan. 'I wish I had been in; I should like to have
seen him in uniform.'

That was all she said, and all she thought; for now there were far more
serious things than ballrooms and young lieutenants occupying Nan's
attention. She and her sisters were going abroad--she for the first
time; and she was busy with foreign languages, and lives of the great
painters, and catalogues, and guide-books, and dressing-cases. The world
she hoped to plunge into on the following week was, in her imagination,
composed of nothing but cathedrals and picture-galleries; and she could
have wished that the picture-galleries might contain nothing but the
labours of Botticelli and Andrea del Sarto. The clear ethereal beauty
and tenderness of the one, the solemn thoughtfulness of the other: these
were things that filled her mind with a mysterious gladness, as if
something had been added to her own life. Rubens she cordially hated.
Of Titian she had as yet seen hardly anything.

At last the wonderful day of setting out arrived, and Mr. Tom graciously
consented to accompany his sisters as far as Newhaven. It was towards
the afternoon that they started, in an open carriage, the maid on the box
beside the coachman. Tom was making facetious remarks about south-west
gales, and his two elder sisters were angrily remonstrating with him.
Nan was silent. She had not a thought for the ships and sailors out
there, or for any pensive young officer bitterly saying to himself that
out of sight was out of mind; and she had forgotten for a moment all
about Singing Sal and her free-and-easy ways. Nan's mind was at this
time filled with Dante, and Florence, and the young Raphael, and the Doge
wedding the Adriatic, and Pompeii, and Savonaro