ey put masts, you know; but then few people know about
boats or care about them.'

She was not very well pleased; but she continued to show him more
sketches, until Mr. Tom came up to see when they were coming to
billiards.

'I shouldn't have shown you these at all,' she said, 'I don't take
interest in them myself. I would far rather draw and paint flowers;
but we never have any flowers now except those waxen-looking heaths and
that flaming pointsettia over there.'

'What did you call it, Madge?' said Mr. Tom.

'I called it pointsettia,' she said, with dignity.

'Gamekeeper's Greek, I should say,' he remarked, with his hands in his
pockets. 'A cross between a pointer and a setter. You shouldn't use
long words, Madge. Come along down.'

But this mention of flowers put a new idea into the head of Captain
Frank King. That very morning he had passed a window where he had seen
all sorts of beautiful blossoms, many of them lying in cotton
wool--pink and white camellias, white hyacinths, scarlet geraniums,
lilies of the valley, and what not. Now might he not be permitted to
send Miss Margaret a selection of these rare blossoms--not as a formal
bouquet at all, but merely for the purposes of painting? They would
simply be materials for an artist; and they would look well in a pretty
basket, on a soft cushion of wool.

CHAPTER XV.

A MESSAGE.

Frank King could never exactly define what peculiarities of mind, or
person, or manner it was that had so singularly attracted him in Nan
Beresford, though he had spent many a meditative hour on board ship in
thinking about her. In any case, that boyish fancy was one that a few
years' absence might very well have been expected to cure. But the
very opposite had happened. Perhaps it was the mere hopelessness of
the thing that made him brood the more over it, until it took
possession of his life altogether. He kept resolutely abroad, so that
he had but few chances of falling in love with somebody else, which is
the usual remedy in such cases. When at length he was summoned home,
about the first news that reached him was of Nan's contemplated
marriage. He was not surprised. And when he consented to go down to
Brighton with her brother, it was that he might have just one more
glimpse of one whom he always had known was lost to him. He had
nothing to reproach her or himself with. It was all a misfortune, and
nothing more. But his life had been changed for him b