stom. Instead, he gave her a brilliant smile--and turned again to
Jeannette.

"Good-bye, once more," he said--and added something under his breath, in
response to which Jeannette nodded, smiling, and went with him to the
front end of the car, where she alone was the last to wave farewell as
he looked back from the platform.

Georgiana caught a final glimpse of him as he ran along it with bared
head, and the whole party waved hands and called parting salutes, in
which she joined. Then Jeannette came back, and Georgiana looked
searchingly at her, her own heart experiencing an uncomfortable sort of
depression as she saw the exquisite flush on her cousin's cheek and the
light in her eyes.

"'Dog in the manger!'" Georgiana sternly reproached herself in her own
thoughts. "Isn't it enough for you to have one man looking devotion at
you, but you must claim everybody in sight?" And she made a determined
and partially successful effort not to mind that things had turned out
as they had. Only--she and James Stuart had been friends a very long
time, and she was sorry to have the parting from him tinged by a cloud
of misunderstanding. It would have been much better, she admitted to
herself now, to have told him frankly in the beginning that Miles
Channing was to be of the party.

CHAPTER XVI

A LITTLE TRUNK

It was a journey of only a few hours to the dock where the party were to
take ship, the sailing being set for early afternoon. Before it seemed
possible they had left the train and were being conveyed by motor to the
pier. It was at the first whiff of salt-water fragrance that Georgiana
felt a sudden onset of dread of the sailing of the great ship. And when
she caught sight of the four black funnels rising above the mass of
smaller smokestacks and masts and spars which lifted beyond the dingy
buildings of the pier, she experienced an unexpected and disconcerting
longing to run away--back to her home.

Her father's face rose before her as she had seen it that morning, pale
and worn, the inner brightness of the undaunted spirit shining through
the thinnest of veils. What if anything should happen to that beloved
face, so that she should never set eyes on it again? The thought shook
her with a throb of pain.

They were on the pier, they were ascending the gangway, they were on one
of the lower decks and entering the elevator which was to lift them
past many intermediate decks to that one, next the highest of all,