trellis, where Attley sat hugging a nurse, while the others
danced a noiseless, neat-footed breakdown never learned at the Middlesex
Hospital. At last, as the tension came out all over us in aches and
tingles that we put down to the country wine, a vision of Mrs. Godfrey,
her grey hair turned to spun-glass, but her eyes triumphant over the
shadow of retreating death beneath them, with Milly, enormously grown,
and clutching life back to her young breast, both stretched out on cane
chairs, clamouring for food.

In this ungirt hour there imported himself into our life a
youngish-looking middle-aged man of the name of Shend, with a blurred
face and deprecating eyes. He said he had gambled with me at the Casino,
which was no recommendation, and I remember that he twice gave me a
basket of champagne and liqueur brandy for the invalids, which a sailor
in a red-tasselled cap carried up to the cottage for me at 3 A.M. He
turned out to be the son of some merchant prince in the oil and colour
line, and the owner of a four-hundred-ton steam yacht, into which, at
his gentle insistence, we later shifted our camp, staff, and equipage,
Milly weeping with delight to escape from the horrible cottage. There we
lay off Funchal for weeks, while Shend did miracles of luxury and
attendance through deputies, and never once asked how his guests were
enjoying themselves. Indeed, for several days at a time we would see
nothing of him. He was, he said, subject to malaria. Giving as they do
with both hands, I knew that Attley and Mrs. Godfrey could take nobly;
but I never met a man who so nobly gave and so nobly received thanks as
Shend did.

'Tell us why you have been so unbelievably kind to us gipsies,' Mrs.
Godfrey said to him one day on deck.

He looked up from a diagram of some Thames-mouth shoals which he was
explaining to me, and answered with his gentle smile:

'I will. It's because it makes me happy--it makes me more than happy--to
be with you. It makes me comfortable. You know how selfish men are? If a
man feels comfortable all over with certain people, he'll bore them to
death, just like a dog. You always make me feel as if pleasant things
were going to happen to me.'

'Haven't any ever happened before?' Milly asked.

'This is the most pleasant thing that has happened to me in ever so many
years,' he replied. 'I feel like the man in the Bible, "It's good for me
to be here." Generally, I don't feel that it's good for me to be
anywh