g. In such a way, her life long,
Jacqueline had sustained existence. Her nourishment was ever the latest
"frisson," to use her own word. She craved thrills of emotion, ecstatic
thrills. Naturally, then, three weeks of ocean had fretted the restless
lass as intolerable, tyrannical.

During the norther's blinding fury, the liner of the Compagnie
Trans-Atlantique had groped widely out of her course, to find herself
off Tampico when the storm abated. But the skipper saw in his ill-luck a
chance for fresh meat, and he decided to communicate with the port
before going on to Vera Cruz. And when Jacqueline found that out, she
decided to communicate with the port too.

Little enough harm in that, truly; if only it were any one else but
Jacqueline. In her case, though, all concerned would have felt easier to
keep her on board. Then, when the ship sailed, they were sure to have
her there. Otherwise, they assuredly were not. For they knew well her
startling capacity for whims. But never, never, could they know the
startling next way a whim of hers might jump. Yet did she give herself
the small pains of wheedling? Not she. The mystery of her august
guardianship, of no less than two emperors, and the responsibility
falling on captain, crew, red trousers, and gilt eagles--He bien, what
then? Neither were they cunning with their dark warnings of outlawry and
violence. Dreadfulest horrors might lurk in the motley Gulf town held by
force against bloodthirsty Mexicans. But croaking like that only gave
brighter promise of the ecstatic shiver. So, parbleu, she went!

The brunt of anxiety fell on poor Sergeant Ney. Here was a young soldier
whom a month before Louis Napoleon had summoned to the Tuileries, to
charge him with the lady's safe return to Maximilian's court in the City
of Mexico, where she was First Dame of Honor about the Empress
Charlotte. The order was not a military one, else it must have fallen to
an officer of rank. It was not even official. But no doubt it enfolded
more of weight for that very reason. Napoleon III. believed that in the
unofficial, in littleness and dark gliding, lay the way to govern a
state. Michel Ney regarded his task as a complete enigma. He had only to
see a girl to the end of her journey. He was a slow-thinking, even a
non-thinking agent, but in a contingency he could fight, still without
thinking.

The girl under his escort, however, was another sort of agent entirely.
She was the spirit of the en