osing, ignored the importance of life's
destination in the enjoyment of the surrounding and immediate scenery.
There was great leave-taking and kerchief-waving and some coursing of
tears down kindred cheeks and noses as the bride-elect was deposited,
with wedding-cake, dress, and addenda, on board the s.s. _Kenilworth_,
in temporary charge of a _passee_ matron of skittish proclivities and
Anglo-Indian epidermis. This obliging lady had volunteered to personify
decorum until arrival in Bombay, when her youthful charge would be
transferred to the chaperonage of Dorrien's sister, on whom the
observances of marriage etiquette depended. Elsie was in no way averse
from the arrangement. All was so novel and so exciting that the Columbus
instinct outbalanced the romantic one. The world had much to offer and
the suburbs very little. There was certainly a well-grown curate, an
Oxford man, ingrained with pedantry and pomposity, and delicately
veneered with artistic ethics; also a retired bookmaker's son, who wore
loud ties and restricted "unmentionables," and who spent money lavishly
nursing a constituency, no one knew where. On the other hand stood
Victor as she remembered him, sound in wind and limb, handsome, honest,
and professedly devoted. Her choice was unhesitating, and she started
forth with dancing heart.

As usual came the inevitable _dies non_, when the unfledged traveller
makes a first bow to the Channel, followed by one or two squeamish days,
when the Bay of Biscay as lauded in poesy and the Bay of Biscay as
discovered in practice are two quite antagonistic things. After which,
with rarified complexion, the sufferer forgets his troubles, and mounts
the deck to enjoy a beatific spell of brine and breeze.

So in due course did Elsie. She found Mrs Willis, who was an old
campaigner, busily engaged in conversation, or its equivalent, the
note-comparing, gossip-scavengering tattle which is inherent to feminine
camp followers of a certain age. Her companions were one Major Lane and
his friend, Captain Burton Aylmer, the latter a person of some celebrity
in military circles where sport was supreme. He looked lazy, long, and
languid, and to those who had seen him neither tent-pegging nor polo
playing, who knew nothing of the spearing of veteran boars, whose tushes
fringed his mantel at home, nor of the "man eater" duel, which in
hunting annals had made his name historical, he seemed effete, if not
affected. He was lolling at