kled, and the collar of his coat turned up.

"It's as though they'd taken pains to torment me!" he cried, stopping
dead. "Did I come on this voyage in order to catch rheumatism and
pneumonia? Really one might have credited Vinrace with more sense.
My dear," Helen was on her knees under a table, "you are only making
yourself untidy, and we had much better recognise the fact that we are
condemned to six weeks of unspeakable misery. To come at all was the
height of folly, but now that we are here I suppose that I can face
it like a man. My diseases of course will be increased--I feel already
worse than I did yesterday, but we've only ourselves to thank, and the
children happily--"

"Move! Move! Move!" cried Helen, chasing him from corner to corner with
a chair as though he were an errant hen. "Out of the way, Ridley, and in
half an hour you'll find it ready."

She turned him out of the room, and they could hear him groaning and
swearing as he went along the passage.

"I daresay he isn't very strong," said Mrs. Chailey, looking at Mrs.
Ambrose compassionately, as she helped to shift and carry.

"It's books," sighed Helen, lifting an armful of sad volumes from the
floor to the shelf. "Greek from morning to night. If ever Miss Rachel
marries, Chailey, pray that she may marry a man who doesn't know his
ABC."

The preliminary discomforts and harshnesses, which generally make the
first days of a sea voyage so cheerless and trying to the temper, being
somehow lived through, the succeeding days passed pleasantly enough.
October was well advanced, but steadily burning with a warmth that made
the early months of the summer appear very young and capricious. Great
tracts of the earth lay now beneath the autumn sun, and the whole of
England, from the bald moors to the Cornish rocks, was lit up from dawn
to sunset, and showed in stretches of yellow, green, and purple. Under
that illumination even the roofs of the great towns glittered. In
thousands of small gardens, millions of dark-red flowers were blooming,
until the old ladies who had tended them so carefully came down the
paths with their scissors, snipped through their juicy stalks, and laid
them upon cold stone ledges in the village church. Innumerable parties
of picnickers coming home at sunset cried, "Was there ever such a day
as this?" "It's you," the young men whispered; "Oh, it's you," the young
women replied. All old people and many sick people were drawn, were it
onl