y for
stratagem of the finest sort; inexhaustible inventive resources;
patience which can flourish under superhuman trials; presence of mind
which can keep its balance victoriously under every possible stress of
emergency--these are some of the qualifications which must accompany
Love on a cruise, when Love embarks in the character of a contraband
commodity not duly entered on the papers of the ship.

Having established a Code of Signals which enabled them to communicate
privately, while the eyes and ears of others were wide open on every
side of them, Natalie and Launce were next confronted by the more
serious difficulty of finding a means of meeting together at stolen
interviews on board the yacht. Possessing none of those precious
moral qualifications already enumerated as the qualifications of an
accomplished lover at sea, Launce had proved unequal to grapple with the
obstacles in his way. Left to her own inventive resources, Natalie
had first suggested the young surgeon's medical studies as Launce's
unanswerable excuse for shutting himself up at intervals in the lower
regions, and had then hit on the happy idea of tearing her trimmings,
and condemning herself to repair her own carelessness, as the
all-sufficient reason for similar acts of self-seclusion on her side.
In this way the lovers contrived, while the innocent ruling authorities
were on deck, to meet privately below them, on the neutral ground of the
main cabin; and there, by previous arrangement at the breakfast-table,
they were about to meet privately now.

Natalie's door was, as usual on these occasions, the first that opened;
for this sound reason, that Natalie's quickness was the quickness to be
depended on in case of accident.

She looked up at the sky-light. There were the legs of the two gentlemen
and the skirts of her aunt visible (and stationary) on the lee side of
the deck. She advanced a few steps and listened. There was a pause in
the murmur of the voices above. She looked up again. One pair of legs
(not her father's) had disappeared. Without an instant's hesitation,
Natalie darted back to her own door, just in time to escape Richard
Turlington descending the cabin stairs. All he did was to go to one
of the drawers under the main-cabin book-case and to take out a map,
ascending again immediately to the deck. Natalie's guilty conscience
rushed instantly, nevertheless, to the conclusion that Richard suspected
her. When she showed herself for t