e. "I envy you, Monsieur George. If I am to go under I should prefer
to be drowned in the sea with the wind on my face. What luck, to feel
nothing less than all the world closing over one's head!"

A short silence ensued before Mr. Blunt's drawing-room voice was heard
with playful familiarity.

"I have often asked myself whether you weren't really a very ambitious
person, Dona Rita."

"And I ask myself whether you have any heart." She was looking straight
at him and he gratified her with the usual cold white flash of his even
teeth before he answered.

"Asking yourself? That means that you are really asking me. But why do
it so publicly? I mean it. One single, detached presence is enough to
make a public. One alone. Why not wait till he returns to those regions
of space and air--from which he came."

His particular trick of speaking of any third person as of a lay figure
was exasperating. Yet at the moment I did not know how to resent it,
but, in any case, Dona Rita would not have given me time. Without a
moment's hesitation she cried out:

"I only wish he could take me out there with him."

For a moment Mr. Blunt's face became as still as a mask and then instead
of an angry it assumed an indulgent expression. As to me I had a rapid
vision of Dominic's astonishment, awe, and sarcasm which was always as
tolerant as it is possible for sarcasm to be. But what a charming,
gentle, gay, and fearless companion she would have made! I believed in
her fearlessness in any adventure that would interest her. It would be a
new occasion for me, a new viewpoint for that faculty of admiration she
had awakened in me at sight--at first sight--before she opened her
lips--before she ever turned her eyes on me. She would have to wear some
sort of sailor costume, a blue woollen shirt open at the throat. . . .
Dominic's hooded cloak would envelop her amply, and her face under the
black hood would have a luminous quality, adolescent charm, and an
enigmatic expression. The confined space of the little vessel's
quarterdeck would lend itself to her cross-legged attitudes, and the blue
sea would balance gently her characteristic immobility that seemed to
hide thoughts as old and profound as itself. As restless, too--perhaps.

But the picture I had in my eye, coloured and simple like an illustration
to a nursery-book tale of two venturesome children's escapade, was what
fascinated me most. Indeed I felt that we two were l