doing."

"'Their' own--you mean Jasper's and hers?"

"No indeed. I mean her mother's and Mrs. Allen's; the girl's too of
course. They put themselves on us by main force."

"Oh yes, I can testify to that. Therefore I'm glad too. We should have
missed it, I think."

"How seriously you take it!" Mrs. Nettlepoint amusedly cried.

"Ah wait a few days!"--and I got up to leave her.




CHAPTER III


The _Patagonia_ was slow, but spacious and comfortable, and there was a
motherly decency in her long nursing rock and her rustling old-fashioned
gait, the multitudinous swish, in her wake, as of a thousand proper
petticoats. It was as if she wished not to present herself in port with
the splashed eagerness of a young creature. We weren't numerous enough
quite to elbow each other and yet weren't too few to support--with that
familiarity and relief which figures and objects acquire on the great
bare field of the ocean and under the great bright glass of the sky. I
had never liked the sea so much before, indeed I had never liked it at
all; but now I had a revelation of how in a midsummer mood it could