e good, and there could be no question of her
captivating laugh, and her charming mouth, which she was always pulling
down with demure irony. She was like her mother in her looks, but her
indolent, droning temperament must have been from her father, whose
memory was lost in that antiquity which swallows up the record of so
many widows' husbands, and who could not have left her what was left of
her mother's money, for none of it had ever been his. It was still her
mother's, and it was supposed to be the daughter's chief attraction.
There must, therefore, have been a good deal of it, for those who were
harshest with the minister did not believe that a little money would
attract him. Not that they really thought him mercenary; some of his
people considered him gay to the verge of triviality, but there were
none that accused him of insincerity. They would have liked a little
more seriousness in him, especially when they had not much of their
own, and would have had him make up in severity of behavior for what he
lacked, and what they wished him to lack, in austerity of doctrine.

The Amstel had lost so much time in the rough weather of her first days
out that she could not make it up with her old-fashioned single screw.
She was at best a ten-day boat, counting from Sandy Hook to Boulogne,
and she had not been four days out when she promised to break her record
for slowness. Three days later Miss Rasmith said to Breckon, as he took
the chair which her mother agilely abandoned to him beside her: "The
head steward says it will be a twelve-day trip, end our bedroom steward
thinks more. What is the consensus of opinion in the smoking-room? Where
are you going, mother? Are you planning to leave Mr. Breckon and me
alone again? It isn't necessary. We couldn't get away from each other
if we tried, and all we ask--Well, I suppose age must be indulged in its
little fancies," she called after Mrs. Rasmith.

Breckon took up the question she had asked him. "The odds are so heavily
in favor of a fifteen-days' run that there are no takers."

"Now you are joking again," she said. "I thought a sea-voyage might make
you serious."

"It has been tried before. Besides, it's you that I want to be serious."

"What about? Besides, I doubt it."

"About Boyne."

"Oh! I thought you were going to say some one else."

"No, I think that is very well settled."

"You'll never persuade my mother," said Miss Rasmith, with a low,
comfortable laugh.