oor opened, and appeared an angular
female form. This was Mrs Stannard, the stewardess, and Mrs Stannard
meant bedtime.

"Dicky," said Mr Lestrange, closing his book, and raising the
table-cloth a few inches, "bedtime."

"Oh, not yet, daddy!" came a sleep-freighted voice from under the
table; "I ain't ready. I dunno want to go to bed, I-- Hi yow!"

Stannard, who knew her work, had stooped under the table, seized him by
the foot, and hauled him out kicking and fighting and blubbering all at
the same time.

As for Emmeline, she having glanced up and recognised the inevitable,
rose to her feet, and, holding the hideous rag-doll she had been
nursing, head down and dangling in one hand, she stood waiting till
Dicky, after a few last perfunctory bellows, suddenly dried his eyes
and held up a tear-wet face for his father to kiss. Then she presented
her brow solemnly to her uncle, received a kiss, and vanished, led by
the hand into a cabin on the port side of the saloon.

Mr Lestrange returned to his book, but he had not read for long when
the cabin door was opened, and Emmeline, in her nightdress, reappeared,
holding a brown paper parcel in her hand, a parcel of about the same
size as the book you are reading.

"My box," said she; and as she spoke, holding it up as if to prove its
safety, the little plain face altered to the face of an angel.

She had smiled.

When Emmeline Lestrange smiled it was absolutely as if the light of
Paradise had suddenly flashed upon her face: the happiest form of
childish beauty suddenly appeared before your eyes, dazzled them and
was gone.

Then she vanished with her box, and Mr Lestrange resumed his book.

This box of Emmeline's, I may say in parenthesis, had given more
trouble aboard ship than all of the rest of the passengers' luggage put
together.

It had been presented to her on her departure from Boston by a lady
friend, and what it contained was a dark secret to all on board, save
its owner and her uncle; she was a woman, or, at all events, the
beginning of a woman, yet she kept this secret to herself--a fact which
you will please note.

The trouble of the thing was that it was frequently being lost.
Suspecting herself, maybe, as an unpractical dreamer in a world filled
with robbers, she would cart it about with her for safety, sit down
behind a coil of rope and fall into a fit of abstraction; be recalled
to life by the evolutions of the crew reefing or furling or what not,