the passengers, overcome with
the tropical temperature and restlessness, were sinking into the fevered
sleep that comes only when night's noon has turned a cool shoulder to
the scorchings of the day. On the open deck, to catch what breeze there
might be, the men slumbered, with forms inartistically outspread; the
women, in a more sheltered nook, though not far removed, were stretched
on couches all in a row like shrouded corpses awaiting the resurrection.
Night looked down as on some pillaged city where only the dead are left
to keep each other ghostly company. Suddenly, from among them there
uprose a small, white wraith--lithe, barefooted, with wandering hair. It
fled, looking nor right nor left--its footfall light as
snowflakes--straight on, to where the ship's track threw a ruffled
tongue across the stillness of the water. In a single flash the silver
ripples gaped, parted, closed again, enfolding in the bosom of the deep
the fair frail atom--an atom that seemed, in the immensity, scarce
larger than the feather from a seagull's wing. Then the serene face of
the ocean smiled smoothly as ever, hugging its hidden secret till the
bursting of the grand chorus when the sea gives up its dead.

* * * * *

And Burton Aylmer, afar off, with outstretched, grey-flanneled limbs,
lay motionless, his hands clasped beneath his head, his eyes staring
with haggard scepticism at the floating ultramarine of the heavens. His
lips moved as though framing a prayer, but he was only muttering to
himself, parrot-wise, the burden of the ritual that bound him to "a
virtuous woman, wedded to mysticism and morphia," who loved him "never a
bit."

Some Crazy Patchwork.

"Oh, love's but a dance,
Where time plays the fiddle."

I.

She was constitutionally a matchmaker, and though recognising the
infirmity was not without its advantages, I refused to be made an
accessory after the fact. I declined to lend myself to the introduction
of my best masculine friend, Lorraine, to my best feminine one, Clair
Conway. There was no petty jealousy at bottom of the dissent, for sixty
winters had rolled over this philosophic head; it was merely that I
shirked the responsibility of meddling with Fate.

But my sister, Sarah Sargent, had no such qualms. "Matchmaker!" she
exclaimed. "Perhaps so--a woman without romance is like an exotic
without scent; and what woman could know a lovely girl, and a man who is
intellec