with the great suffering they brought the gentle invalid.
Arethusa drew away from the couch abruptly. She felt suddenly
overwhelmed with her inability ever to do the right thing; a feeling
which Miss Eliza was quite often successful in arousing in her niece.

Miss Asenath offered her own cobwebby handkerchief to dry Arethusa's
reddened eyes. Then she asked Miss Eliza if she would not be good
enough to read aloud to them for awhile. Miss Asenath had some of the
makings of a diplomat.

None of the roomful of women would really listen, for Miss Letitia
would be far too intent on counting stitches, and Miss Asenath would
dream, and to Arethusa, Miss Eliza's choice of reading matter was
anything but interesting; but Miss Eliza herself would be made
beatific. She considered herself somewhat gifted as an elocutionist;
during her course at the old Freeport Seminary, now so long ago, she
had had the most lady-like of instruction. She prided herself on her
ability to put "expression" into her reading. Thus would amiability be
especially restored in her quarter, and poor, persecuted Arethusa might
have a little while in which to attain some degree of calmness once
more.

So Miss Asenath patted the place at her side invitingly. Arethusa
cuddled up very close; Miss Eliza went back to the beginning of her
article, having read a paragraph or two; and peace began to reign with
the very first word of the reading aloud.

When Miss Eliza's voice, with all the proper inflections, had followed
the various whys and wherefores of the death of Servetus to a
triumphant conclusion, she was a different person. All the sharpness
aroused by Arethusa's seeming scorn of Timothy had disappeared. She was
even ready to say, when her niece stooped to kiss her good-night, that
she was sorry if she had made her unhappy in her manner of discussing
Timothy, and Timothy's matrimonial possibilities; and this was a very
great concession for Miss Eliza.

"But you are making a great big mistake, Arethusa," she could not help
adding, "every way, in not taking Timothy while you can."

Yet it was amiably said, and did not cause the slightest excitement.

Which goes but to prove more surely that Miss Asenath seemed to have
missed her calling.

CHAPTER VII

"That was such a pretty girl that just went past us, Ross."

Elinor Worthington's smiling glance followed the girl far down the
deck.

For the creature was so deliciously young, everything ab