right, and through it came the
sound of footsteps.

"Oh, here you are, Miss Ormskirk. I've been looking for you everywhere.
This is our dance."

Lilith, catching the satirical twinkle in the other's eyes in the
starlight, did not know which way to turn to control an overmastering
impulse to laugh uninterruptedly for about five minutes, the cruel part
of it being that the interrupter was Swaynston himself.

The latter, a pursy individual, was holding out an arm somewhat in the
attitude of a seal's flipper; but Lilith did not take it.

"Do be very good-natured and excuse me," she said. "I don't want to
dance any more to-night; the noise and heat have made my head ache."

"Really, really? I'll find you a chair then, in some quiet corner,"
fussed Swaynston. But Lilith seemed not enthusiastic over that
allurement, and finally, with some difficulty, she got rid of him; he
grinning "from the teeth outwards," but consumed with fury nevertheless.

So that was why she had stolen away from them all, to slip up and talk
in a quiet corner with that fellow Stanninghame, who was probably some
absconding swindler, with a couple of detectives and a warrant waiting
for him in Table Bay? Thus Swaynston.

Nor would it have tended to allay his irritation could he have heard the
object of it after his departure.

"So you think he is worse than the post?" she said, with a laugh in her
eyes. "Yet he is one of the most devoted of my--poodles."

The demure malice of her tone no more disconcerted the other than that
former endeavour to show him she had overheard his remarks by quoting
his own words.

"Oh, yes," was the unconcerned reply. "He sits up on his hind legs a
little better than any of them."

For a few moments she said nothing, seeming to have become infected
with her companion's dreamy meditativeness. Then:

"And you are not tired of the voyage yet? You were saying the other day
that its monotony was enjoyable."

"I say so still. Look!" he broke off, pointing to the sea.

A commotion was going on beneath its surface. Their grisly shapes vivid
in the disturbed phosphorescence, drawing a wake of flame behind them,
rushed two great sharks. Hither and thither they darted, every detail of
their ugly forms discernible on the framing of the phosphorescent blaze,
even the set glare of the cruel eye; and, no less nimble in swift
doubling flashes, several smaller fish were trying to evade the laws of
nature--the absorption of the