l the
relations of the people on the _Queen Mab_ came down, and Mr.
Dainopoulos, who'd taken his landlady's daughter for the excursion, was
sitting there in a blanket when the landlady and her husband came in.
They hadn't found her. You know bodies don't come up sometimes,
especially when a ship turns over. And they caught hold of him, calling
out 'Where is our girl? What have you done with our girl?' They
_screamed_ at him!"

"Was he engaged to her?" asked Mr. Spokesly.

"Just the same as I was with Georgie Litwell who was drowned. Keeping
company."

"And what happened then?"

"Why, we fell in love. That's what I was going to tell you so long as
you promised not to laugh. He was in a wholesale tobacco merchant's in
Mark Lane then and he took lodgings near us at Haverstock Hill. Those
other people behaved as though he'd held their daughter's head under.
Really they did. How could he help it? He saved six besides me. It
wasn't his fault the boat sank."

"No, of course not. I see now."

"And then, you know, Mother made a fuss because he was foreign. Mother's
a Berkshire woman, and she said she'd never thought she'd live to see a
child of hers marry a man from goodness knows where. She didn't half go
on, I can tell you. And Father had his own way of making me perfectly
happy. He'd ask me, how many in the harem already? And I couldn't do a
thing, lying on my back helpless. And at last, with the doctor saying I
needed a sea-voyage to get my strength back, I thinks to myself, I'll
take one; and with the accident insurance I had had the sense to carry
ever since I'd started going to business, and what Boris had in the
bank, we went. Or came, rather. We've been here ever since and nobody's
heard either of us regret it, either."

And as she lay there looking out into the darkness of the Gulf with
shining resolute eyes, it was plain that this romantic destiny of hers
was a treasured possession. It dominated her life. She had found in it
the indispensable inspiration for happiness, an ethical yet potent
anodyne for the forfeiture of many homely joys. It was for her the
equivalent of a social triumph or acceptance among peeresses of the
realm. It is to be suspected that she had ever in her mind a vision of
the wonder and awe she had evoked in the souls of the suburban girls
among whom she had spent her life, and that this vision supported her
and formed the base of a magnificent edifice. And it was an integral
part of thi