e smoked cigarettes incessantly. She was one
of those old women whose energy seems to increase with age, tireless as
a gnat she was always the last in bed and the first on deck, though
lying in her bunk half the night reading French novels of which she had
a trunkful and smoking her eternal cigarettes.

Beside her sat her niece, Cleo de Bromsart, English on the mother's side
and educated in England, a girl of twenty, unmarried, dark-haired,
fragile and beautiful as a dream. She was one of the old nobility,
without dilution, yet strangely enough with money, for the Bromsarts,
without marrying into trade, had adapted themselves to the new times so
cleverly that Eugene de Bromsart the last of his race had retired from
life leaving his only daughter and the last of her race wealthy, even by
the standard of wealth set in Paris. She was a sportswoman and, despite
her lack of frailty, had led an outdoor life and possessed a nerve of
steel.

Madame de Warens had brought the girl up after she left school, had
laboured over her and found her labour in vain. Cleo had no leanings
towards the People and the opinions of her aunt seemed to her a sort of
disreputable madness bred on hypocrisy. Cleo looked on the lower classes
just as she looked on animals, beings with rights of their own but
belonging to an entirely different order of creation, and one thing
certainly could be said for her--she was honest in her outlook on life.

Beside her sat Doctor Epinard, the ship's doctor, a serious young man
who spoke little, and the fifth at table was Lagross, the sea painter,
who had come for the sake of his health and to absorb the colours of the
ocean. The vision of the _Albatross_ with towering canvas breasting the
blue-green seas in an atmosphere of sunset and storm was with him still
as he sat listening to the chatter of the others and occasionally
joining in. He intended to paint that picture.

It had come to him as a surprise. They had been playing cards when a
quarter-master called them on deck saying that the weather had moderated
and that there was a ship in sight, and there, away across the tumbling
seas, the _Albatross_ had struck his vision, remote, storm surrounded,
and sunlit, almost a vision of the past in these days of mechanism.

"Now tell me, Prince," Madame de Warens was saying, "how long do you
propose staying at this Kerguelen Land of yours?"

"Not more than a week," replied the Prince. "I want to take some
sounding