she seemed to him an
impetuous and capricious thing, for whose better protection the accident
of his companionship was extremely fortunate,--at another hour, a woman
too strangely sweet to part with; and then Mr. Raleigh remembered that
in all his years he had really known but two women, and one of these had
not spent a week in his memory.

Mademoiselle Le Blanc came on deck, one evening, and, wrapping a soft,
thick mantle round her, looked about for a minute, shaded her eyes from
the sunset, meantime, with a slender, transparent hand, bowed to one,
spoke to another, slipped forward and joined Mr. Raleigh, where he
leaned over the ship's side.

"_Voici ma capote!_" said she, before he was aware of her approach.
"_Ciel! qu'il fait frais!_"

"We have changed our skies," said Mr. Raleigh, looking up.

"It is not necessary that you should tell me that!" she replied. "I
shiver all the time. I shall become a little iceberg, for the sake of
floating down to melt off Martinique!"

"Warm yourself now in the sunset; such a blaze was kindled for the
purpose."

"Whenever I see a sunset, I find it to be a splendid fact, _une
jouissance vraie, Monsieur_, to think that men can paint,--that these
shades, which are spontaneous in the heavens, and fleeting, can be
rivalled by us and made permanent,--that man is more potent than light."

"But you are all wrong in your _jouissance_."

She pouted her lip, and hung over the side in an attitude that it seemed
he had seen a hundred times before.

"That sunset, with all its breadth and splendor, is contained in every
pencil of light."

She glanced up and laughed.

"Oh, yes! a part of its possibilities. Which proves?"--

"That color is an attribute of light and an achievement of man."

"Ca et la,
Toute la journee,
Le vent vain va
En sa tournee,"

hummed the girl, with a careless dismissal of the subject.

Mr. Raleigh shut up the note-book in which he had been writing, and
restored it to his pocket. She turned about and broke off her song.

"There is the moon on the other side," she said, "floating up like a
great bubble of light. She and the sun are the scales of a balance, I
think; as one ascends, the other sinks."

"There is a richness in the atmosphere, when sunset melts into moonrise,
that makes one fancy it enveloping the earth like the bloom on a plum."

"And see how it has powdered the sea! The waters look like the wings of
the _papillon b