feel that I wanted to be far
away from it and from here. Then, Monsieur le Prince, with his story of
desolate Kerguelen, completed the feeling. It is strong upon me now."

"You do not wish to go to Kerguelen then?" said the Prince smiling as he
helped himself to the entree that was being passed round.

"Oh, monsieur, it is not a question of my wishes at all," replied the
girl.

"But, excuse me," replied the owner of the _Gaston de Paris_, "it is
entirely a question of your wishes. We are not a cargo boat, Captain
Lepine is on the bridge, he has only to go into his chart house, set his
course for New Amsterdam, and a turn of the wheel will put our stern to
the south." He touched an electric bell push, attached to the table, as
he spoke.

"And your soundings?" asked she.

"They can wait for some other time or some other man, sea depths are
pretty constant."

A quarter-master appeared at the saloon door, came forward and saluted.

"Ask Captain Lepine to come aft," said the Prince. "I wish to speak to
him."

"Wait," said Mademoiselle Bromsart. Then to her host. "No. I will not
have the course altered for me. I am quite clear upon that point. What I
said was foolish and it would pain me more than I can tell to have it
acted upon. I really mean what I say."

He looked at her for a moment and seemed to glimpse something of the
iron will that lay at the heart of her beauty and fragility.

"That will do," said he to the quarter-master. "You need not give my
message."

Madame de Warens laughed. "That is what it is to be young," said she,
"if an old woman like me had spoken of changing our course I doubt if
your quarter-master would have been called, Monsieur. But I have no fads
and fancies, thank heaven, I leave all that to the young women of
to-day."

"Pardon me, madame," said Doctor Epinard speaking for almost the first
time, "but in impressions produced by objects upon the mind there is no
room for the term fancy. I speak of course of the normal mind free of
disease. Furthermore, we talk of objects as things of secondary
importance and the mind as everything. Now I am firmly convinced that
the mind of man, so far from being a thing apart from the objects that
form its environment, is, in fact, nothing else but a mirror or focus
upon which objects register their impressions and that all the thinking
in the world is done not really by the mind but by the objects that form
our thoughts and the reasons, utterly di