ng her protest, and
thinking, with grim amusement, how he was about to fulfil the very role
he had been satirizing his younger friend about, namely, fetch and carry
for the spoilt beauty of the quarter-deck.

"Oh, thanks; anywhere that's cool."

"Then you can't do better than leave it where it is," he rejoined, with
a quiet smile, setting down the chair again and resuming his own.

Lilith Ormskirk smiled too, but she made no objection, sliding
comfortably into the chair, and gazing meditatively at the point of the
neat and shapely deck-shoe just peeping forth from beneath her skirt.

"What are they doing over there?" she began; "drawing the 'sweep,' are
they not? How is it you are not there too, Mr. Stanninghame? Even those
of the men who won't help us in getting up any fun are always ready
enough for anything of that kind. Well, I suppose it gives them
something to do."

Something to do! that eternal "something to do!"

"But that's just what I don't want--not on board this ship, at any
rate," he retorted. "It's a grand opportunity for lazing, an opportunity
that can't occur often in life, and I want to make the most of it."

She glanced furtively at his face. It was a face that interested her,
had done so since she first beheld it. A very out-of-the-common face,
she had decided; and the careless reserve, the very indifference of its
owner's habit of speech, had powerfully added to her interest. They had
met before, had exchanged a few words now and again, but had never
conversed.

"A thing that is a standing puzzle to me," he went on--"would be,
rather, if I knew a little less of human nature--is the alacrity with
which people waste their precious time in order to make a few shillings.
It isn't a craving after profit either, for there can't be much profit
about it. Yet Myers there, the Hebraic instinct ever to the fore, must
needs throw away the splendid recuperative opportunities afforded by a
sea voyage, must needs spend the whole of each and every morning getting
up that miserable 'sweep.' It must be the sheer Hebraic instinct of
delighting to handle coin--the ecstasy of contact with it even."

"And the other--the one who helps him? He's not Hebraic?"

"No, he's English. Therefore he must be forever 'getting up' something.
We pride ourselves upon our solid deliberation, yet we are about the
fussiest and most interfering race on the face of the globe."

"Then you don't have anything to do with the popular