led what to ask--and _now_! All the
good things I am going to lose march in gloomy procession before my
mind. _No house-warming!_ It will have to be put off till we come back,
and, by the time that we come back, Bobby will almost certainly have
been sent to some foreign station for three or four years. And who knows
what may happen before he returns? Perhaps--for I am in the mood when
all adversities seem antecedently probable--he will _never_ come back.
Perhaps never again shall I be the willing victim of his buffets, never
again shall I buffet him in return.

And the _sea_! It is all very fine for Sir Roger to take it so easily,
to laugh and make unfeeling jokes at my expense! _He_ does not lie on
the flat of his back, surrounded by the horrid paraphernalia of
sea-sickness. _He_ walks up and down, with his hands in his pockets,
smoking a cigar, and talking to the captain. _He_ cares nothing for the
heaving planks. The taste of the salt air gives _him_ an appetite. An
_appetite_! Oh, prodigious! I must say I think he might have been a
_little_ more feeling, might have expressed himself a _little_ more
sympathetically.

By dint of thinking over Sir Roger's iniquities on this head, I
gradually work myself up into such a state of righteous indignation and
injury against him, that when, after a longish interval, the door again
opens to readmit him, I affect neither to see nor hear him, nor be in
any way conscious of his presence. Through the chinks of my fingers,
dolorously spread over my face, I see that he has sat down on the other
side of the table, just opposite me, and that he is smiling in the same
unmirthful, gently sarcastic way, as he was when he left me.

"Nancy," he says, "I have been thinking what a pity it is that I have
not a _yacht_! We might have taken our own time then, and done it
enjoyably--made quite a pleasure-trip of it."

I drop my hands into my lap.

"People's ideas of pleasure differ," I say, with trite snappishness.

"Yes," he answers, a little sadly, "no two people look at any thing in
_quite_ the same way, do they?--not even husband and wife."

"I suppose not," say I, still thinking of the steward.

"Do you know," he says, leaning his arms and his crossed hands on the
table between us, and steadfastly regarding me, "that I never saw you
look miserable before, never? I did not even know that you _could_!"

"I am not _miserable_," I answer, rather ashamed of myself, "that is far
too stro