d not help
wavering between repugnance and admiration, and he kept asking himself
whether this man was really the sort of person that Arthur Stoss had
described him to be, no gentleman, a weakling, an idle ragamuffin.

XXIII

As they arose from table and were ascending the companionway to the deck,
Hahlstroem suddenly said to Frederick:

"My daughter is expecting you. We have a friend on board, Mr. Achleitner,
a soft creature, but the possessor of much money, which he doesn't know
the best way to get rid of. So he made it worth while for one of the
officers to give up his luxurious cabin opening on deck to my daughter.
Unfortunately, that gives him the right to make an unmitigated nuisance
of himself sometimes."

When the men entered the comparatively roomy cabin on deck, they found
Achleitner sitting on a rather unsteady chair, while Mara, carefully
wrapped up, was lying stretched out on a couch. She instantly called
to her father, please to remove Mr. Achleitner, who was boring her, and
signified to Frederick that she had a special favour to ask of him.
Hahlstroem and Achleitner obediently withdrew, and Frederick _nolens
volens_ had to seat himself on the camp-chair.

"How can I be of service?" he asked.

She put one of those inconsequential requests with which she liked to
busy everybody about her. She did this, she explained, because if many
people were not doing something for her, she felt neglected.

"But if you don't want to do it," she added--it was to get her a bottle
of perfume, or something of the sort, for which a stewardess would have
been the right person to ask--"but if you don't want to do it, then
please don't. I should prefer it if you didn't. In fact, if I bore you,
I would just as soon sit alone."

Frederick realised that this beginning was a foolish expression of
embarrassment.

"I should like to be of service to you in anything I can, and you don't
in the least bore me."

That was the truth. Alone with Ingigerd in her cabin, where the vessel's
motion was less perceptible, he was sensitive to the full fascination of
her presence. The pangs of the ocean crossing had given her sweet girlish
face a waxen transparency. At her request the stewardess had loosened her
hair, and it lay spread in a golden flood over her white pillow, a golden
flood, the sight of which was highly disturbing to Frederick. Where was
there an adornment for the head, a queen's diadem, which could exercise
so