full length in a rattan chair, listening
indolently to the flippant duologue of the major and the grass widow.
The lady did not interest him. Her type was too cheap. She represented
one of an order that seemed to be chromo-lithographed in reams for the
benefit of garrisons in Great Britain, India, and the Colonies; but when
he discovered in her the chaperone of a young _ingenue_, with fringeless
forehead and skin like new milk dashed with sunset, his nonchalance
subsided, and he became almost polite. Mrs Willis was prompt to detect
the change of tactics, and swift to solve the problem. She plumed
herself not a little on the possession of a decoy duck, capable of
luring so desirable a prey as Captain Burton Aylmer into her social
toils.

"Be civil to him, my dear," she advised when in private. "Half the women
on board would give their eyes to get him in tow. He is very
_difficile_." Mrs Willis affected the slangy in talking to young girls.
She thought it gave a contemporaneous flavour to the intercourse.

"He seemed to me pleasant enough," breathed Elsie, who was quite
unscienced in complexities of character.

"He can be when he chooses. They say Lady Staines would have given her
back hair for him and followed him barefoot across Asia--but he didn't
see it!"

"Oh!"

"He is very accustomed to that sort of thing. His heart is quite
tear-toughened, a kind of spongiopiline--receptive and impermeable at
the same time."

"Perhaps you do him an injustice; there may never have been a question
of his heart?"

"His sponsor so soon? Beware, little girl; they say he never loved since
a certain queen of society threw him over for strawberry leaves."

"Threw him over!" A line of Tennyson regarding the value of coronets
flashed across her. She wondered with a girlish contemplative scepticism
how this bronzed physique, this heroic modelling, this almost womanly
gentleness of expression had failed, having won, to hold.

* * * * *

Hour after hour passed in the usual shipboard routine, by which every
day became the exact counterpart of its forerunner. Only to Elsie was
each moment a joy and a revelation. It was impossible to disregard the
fact that, from being a juvenile of no account, she had developed into a
personage--a personage, whose humble servitor society had been ready
enough to serve. In the conquest there was no elation such as might have
existed for maturer women. She was too absorbe