hly furnished
salon on a yacht; five fair effects in ball dresses sipping Balm of
Gilead; the whole arrangement on a rocking platform, with mechanism
hidden by realistically painted waves. But the dryads were previously
engaged by the prostrate Nadine--all except one.

When they were sufficiently restored to take an interest, Peter
smuggled grapefruit, chocolates, and novels into the nursery. The
novels his sister had brought with her to kill time during the voyage;
but as it happened, she was killing it with Lord Raygan instead and
never missed the books.

Nadine had been obliged to take first-class tickets for her models;
otherwise the rules of the ship would not have allowed them past the
barrier, even in the pursuit of business. But they sardined in one
cabin, near the bow, on the deepest down deck allotted to
first-classhood, and their private lives were scarcely more enjoyable
than the professional. They were, to be sure, theoretically able to
take exercise at certain hours, weather permitting; but weather did
not permit, and four of the dryads, when free, sought distraction in
lying down rather than walking. It was only the fifth who would not
take the weather's "no" for an answer.

She had a mackintosh, and with her head looking very small and neat,
wound in a brown veil the colour of her hair, she joined the brigade
of the strong men and women who defied the winds by night. From eight
to ten she staggered and slid up and down the wet length of the
least-frequented deck, or flopped and gasped joyously for a few
minutes in an unclaimed chair.

Being "not a bit like the rest" of her sister dryads, she refrained
from mentioning this habit to Mr. Rolls, whose prowling place was on
higher decks. Not that she was still what he would have called
"standoffish" with him. That would have been silly and Victorian after
the grapefruit and chocolates and novels, to say nothing of balm by
the bottleful. The last dress she had worn on the first day of their
acquaintance, the "Yielding Heart," had to a certain extent prophesied
her attitude with the one man who knocked at the dryad door. Miss
Child not only thought Mr. Rolls "might be rather nice," but was
almost sure he was. She was nice to him, too, in dryad land, when he
paid his visits to the sisterhood, but she did not "belong on his
deck."

By and by, however, he discovered her in the mackintosh and veil. It
was one night when a young playwright who had seized on h