d with the all ruling
presence to heed what happened around. The wind was only fresh when it
carried his voice to her ear, the waves only buoyant when they danced
beneath their mutual pacings; day was light, because she shared it with
him; night was dark, because they were apart.

At last Mrs Willis betrayed signs of alarm. "A mild flirtation is all
very well, but people will talk; you must really be careful, Elsie! What
will Victor Dorrien say when he comes to claim his bride?"

Dorrien! His bride! The words mentally thrust Bradshaw into the binding
of Keats; she suffocated as though she had steamed direct from Eden to
seaside lodgings. Was she indeed affianced to this almost unremembered
lover of her childhood, and was she indeed journeying straight into his
arms? How came it that the purpose of her voyage had been almost
forgotten, that the seconds had grown so full of actuality as to outsize
the horizon, the zenithed sunshine so blinding, that all surroundings
seemed enveloped in atmospheric haze?

Each morning in her cabin she registered a vow that the coming day
should be the last of illusion, that the stern facts of destiny should
be faced; each night her fevered, impatient brain cried for dawn, to
prove by the sight of the noble outlines, the sound of the beloved
voice, that the end was not yet come. It was scarcely his utterances
that attracted; perhaps the knowledge of his soul grew best from what he
failed to say, what he failed to seem. But she saw the weary boredom of
his eyes change to fire as her glance sought his, and she knew her
lightest speech sped like spores upon the wind to find a root and
resting place within his heart. She yearned to hint at her projected
fate--she yearned, yet dreaded. Dissection of the sentimental mosaic of
years is no facile undertaking, so many scraps and fragments go to the
gradual making of the romantic whole, and she dared not approach the
culminating tangle of the love story without explaining in detail the
nascence and growth of the dilemma.

Thus with the course of the vessel drifted the craft of emotion, past
Suez, through the broil of the Red Sea, out again into a sapphire ocean.

Mrs Willis, looking ahead, saw breakers and imminent wreck.

"You are both mad," she thundered at Elsie. "This must cease; you must
tell him that in a few days, immediately on your arrival in Bombay in
fact, you are to marry."

"I cannot."

"But, child, think of it. What can you do?