kylights' overhang to the alien's level and
with looks as beseeching as his waved him back a step. Then with the
same mute entreaty she faced Julian and Hugh. But there was a ludicrous
contrast, visible to all, between Hugh's phlegm and her brother's pomp,
and by a flash of feminine instinct she divined the best mood with which
to match it. Grimly elated, Hugh saw what was coming. Julian saw, and
groaned a wearied wrath. The captain, the commodore--for the commodore
had returned--the Gilmores, the Yazoo couple, the pilots overhead, all
waited with lively and knowing gaze. She went limp, hid her face,
swayed, sank to one knee, and filled the whole width of the narrow
passage with arms and draperies, the meanwhile breaking into a laugh so
wholly soliloqual that the two players became learners. But again she
sprang erect and had hardly thrown her curls back from her blushing face
when her mother, the bishop, and the doctor stepped from the sick-room,
and madame addressed the immigrant:

"Ah, ritturn, if you ple-ease. Me, I am ritturning!"

"Yes," chimed the bishop and the doctor; "yes, at once!" and the exile,
with pleading looks to Ramsey, to the others by turn and to her again,
went below. Madame and the physician began to follow.

"How's Lucian?" called Ramsey after them.

"Getting well," replied both. They passed behind the wheel-house and
only the pilots knew that at its corner Madame Hayle stopped where she
could still see and hear. All others kept their eyes on Julian, who was
in a redder heat than ever, and on Hugh, who was addressing him in a
depth of tone that amused the Gilmores almost as keenly as it did
Ramsey, who had rejoined them at his back. Suddenly he faced around.

"If Miss Hayle," he said, "would as soon go below----"

Miss Hayle sang her reply, bugled it: "She would no-ot."

Hugh stepped down into her brother's path and faced him again: "You have
written your father a letter----"

Julian's head flew up but bent in slow avowal.

"To be put aboard the _Antelope_," pursued Hugh----

The head went higher: "Well, sir?"

"To outrun this boat."

"And--if--I--have, sir?"

"Why, yes," murmured the squire's brother-in-law and sister, to the
Gilmores, "suppose he has?"

"So have I," said Hugh to Julian. He glanced up to the Yazoo couple and
then to the bishop self-isolated near the sick-room door. Ramsey and the
couple laughed. Hugh turned her way again: "If Miss Hayle----"

"She wouldn't," sai