re phosphorescence at the bows, and greater
silence and darkness by the hand-steering gear aft.

Awful things might have happened to Georgie but for the little fact that
he had never studied the first principles of the game he was expected to
play. So when Mrs. Zuleika, at Aden, told him how motherly an interest
she felt in his welfare, medals, brevet, and all, Georgie took her at
the foot of the letter, and promptly talked of his own mother, three
hundred miles nearer each day, of his home, and so forth, all the way up
the Red Sea. It was much easier than he had supposed to converse with
a woman for an hour at a time. Then Mrs. Zuleika, turning from parental
affection, spoke of love in the abstract as a thing not unworthy of
study, and in discreet twilights after dinner demanded confidences.
Georgie would have been delighted to supply them, but he had none, and
did not know it was his duty to manufacture them. Mrs. Zuleika expressed
surprise and unbelief, and asked--those questions which deep asks of
deep. She learned all that was necessary to conviction, and, being very
much a woman, resumed (Georgie never knew that she had abandoned) the
motherly attitude.

"Do you know," she said, somewhere in the Mediterranean, "I think you're
the very dearest boy I have ever met in my life, and I'd like you to
remember me a little. You will when you are older, but I want you to
remember me now. You'll make some girl very happy."

"Oh! Hope so," said Georgie, gravely; "but there's heaps of time for
marryin' an' all that sort of thing, ain't there?"

"That depends. Here are your bean-bags for the Ladies' Competition. I
think I'm growing too old to care for these tamashas."

They were getting up sports, and Georgie was on the committee. He never
noticed how perfectly the bags were sewn, but another woman did, and
smiled--once. He liked Mrs. Zuleika greatly. She was a bit old, of
course, but uncommonly nice. There was no nonsense about her.

A few nights after they passed Gibraltar his dream returned to him.
She who waited by the brushwood-pile was no longer a little girl, but a
woman with black hair that grew into a "widow's peak," combed back from
her forehead. He knew her for the child in black, the companion of the
last six years, and, as it had been in the time of the meetings on the
Lost Continent, he was filled with delight unspeakable. "They," for some
dreamland reason, were friendly or had gone away that night, and the t