just because on this pleasant, delightful morning it
was pleasant and delightful to talk to someone and share the pleasure.

Vereker Sarle had made the voyage to South Africa so many times that he
had lost count of them, and knew Madeira so well that it bored him to go
ashore there any more.

"We have the best of it from here, in spite of a little coal dust," he
told her, for with a great deal of rattling, banging, and singing on the
lower decks the ship was taking on her voyage ration of coal. "Still,
you should go ashore and see it some time. It is worth a visit for the
sake of the gardens, the breakfast of fresh fish at the hotel on the
hilltop, and the bumping rush down again in the man-drawn sleighs."

He took it for granted that she was a woman travelling for pleasure and
likely to be back this way soon. While she gave a little inward sigh,
wondering whether she would ever have the money to return to England, or
if it would be her fate to live in exile for ever.

Sarle presented her with one of his simple maxims of life.

"All good citizens of the world should do everything once and once only,"
he averred, with his frank and disarming smile. "If we stuck to that
rule life would never go stale on us."

"I'm afraid it would hardly apply to everyday life and all the weary
things we have to do over and over again."

"I was thinking of the big things," he said slowly. "Like potting your
first elephant or falling in love. I don't know what equivalents women
have for these things."

April could not forbear a little ripple of laughter.

"I believe they fall in love, too, sometimes," she said. But Sarle, with
his sea-blue gaze on her, answered gravely:

"I know very little about them."

It was hard to decide whether he was an expert flirt with new methods, or
really and truly a man with a heart as guileless as his eyes. But, at
any rate, he was amusing, and April forgot her tears and anger completely
in the pleasant hour they spent together until the passengers, recalled
by the ship's siren, began to return from ashore.

Diana and her bodyguard were the last to arrive, the men laden with
fruit, flowers, and numerous parcels, and the girl more openly careless
of the rest of the world than before. They took possession of a group of
chairs that did not belong to them, and scattered their possessions upon
the deck. Pomegranates, nectarines, and bananas began to roll in every
direction, to the inconvenie