o you, very well, Miss Keene. You were saying, only last night,
you hardly remembered him."

The young girl sighed.

"I was very young when he went West," she said explanatorily; "but I
dare say I shall recall him. What I meant is, that he will be very glad
to know that I have been so happy here, and he will like all those who
have made me so."

"Then you have been happy?"

"Yes; very." She had withdrawn her eyes, and was looking vaguely towards
the companion-way. "Everybody has been so kind to me."

"And you are grateful to all?"

"Yes."

"Equally?"

The ship gave a sudden forward plunge. Miss Keene involuntarily clutched
the air with her little hand, that had been resting on the settee
between them, and the young man caught it in his own.

"Equally?" he repeated, with an assumed playfulness that half veiled his
anxiety. "Equally--from the beaming Senor Perkins, who smiles on all, to
the gloomy Mr. Hurlstone, who smiles on no one?"

She quickly withdrew her hand, and rose. "I smell the breakfast," she
said laughingly. "Don't be horrified, Mr. Brace, but I'm very hungry."
She laid the hand she had withdrawn lightly on his arm. "Now help me
down to the cabin."

CHAPTER II.

ANOTHER PORTENT.

The saloon of the Excelsior was spacious for the size of the vessel, and
was furnished in a style superior to most passenger-ships of that epoch.
The sun was shining through the sliding windows upon the fresh and
neatly arranged breakfast-table, but the presence of the ominous
"storm-racks," and partitions for glass and china, and the absence of
the more delicate passengers, still testified to the potency of the Gulf
of California. Even those present wore an air of fatigued discontent,
and the conversation had that jerky interjectional quality which
belonged to people with a common grievance, but a different individual
experience. Mr. Winslow had been unable to shave. Mrs. Markham,
incautiously and surreptitiously opening a port-hole in her state-room
for a whiff of fresh air while dressing, had been shocked by the
intrusion of the Pacific Ocean, and was obliged to summon assistance
and change her dress. Jack Crosby, who had attired himself for tropical
shore-going in white ducks and patent leathers, shivered in the keen
northwest Trades, and bewailed the cheap cigars he had expected to buy
at Mazatlan. The entrance of Miss Keene, who seemed to bring with her
the freshness and purity of the dazzling outer ai