ish:

"Good morning, senorita. I hope I did not startle you when I came
aboard. And I said things I should not have said in the presence of a
lady. But believe me, senorita, I was drunk with delight."

CHAPTER X

"MISSING AT LLOYD'S"

Elsie had slept long and soundly: she found herself in a new world of
sunshine and calm. When she looked over the side to examine the
crudely fashioned canoe, she was astonished by the limpid purity of the
water. She could see white pebbles and vegetation at a vast depth. It
seemed to be impossible that a few hours should have worked such a
change, but Suarez assured her that the streams which tumbled down the
precipitous gorges of the hills ran clear quickly after rain, owing to
the sifting of the surface drainage by the phenomenal tree-growth.

"Wherever timber can lodge on the hillsides," he told her, "fallen
trunks lie in layers of fifteen or twenty feet. They rot there, and
young saplings push their way through to the light and air, while
creepers bind them in an impenetrable mass; in many places small trees
and shrubs of dense foliage take root amidst the decaying stumps
beneath, so that even the Indians cannot pass from one point to
another, but are compelled to climb the rocky watercourses or follow
the slopes of glaciers. When you see what appears to be a smooth green
space above the lower brown-colored belt of copper beech, that is not a
moss-covered stretch of open land, but the closely packed tops of young
trees, where a new tract has been bared by an avalanche."

She was in no mood this morning to assimilate the marvels of Hanover
Island. Her brain had been cleared, restored to the normal, by
refreshing sleep. With a more active perception of the curious
difficulties which beset the _Kansas_ came a feeling akin to despair.
The brightness of nature served rather to convert the ship into a
prison. Storm and stress, whether of the elements or of the less
candid foes who lurked unseen on the neighboring shores, made the
_Kansas_ a veritable fortress, a steel refuge seemingly impregnable.
But the knowledge of the vessel's helplessness, and of the equally
desperate hazard which beset her inmates, was rendered only more
poignant by the smiling aspect of land and sea.

Elsie was not a philosopher. She was just a healthy, clean-minded
Englishwoman, imbued with a love of art for art's sake, a girl whose
wholesome, courageous temperament probably unfitted her to