o on
deck. I would sooner have the mutineers. Oh, but it was insensate to
leave Europe and France. No, it is a country the most diabolic this
side of the ocean. What is there under the sea, Sir John?"

"Why, the fishes, Mademoiselle," said he, grinning.

"No, no; understand me, Monsieur. I mean under the ground. What is
there?" She waved her hands. "Sea, sea, sea, nothing else, and
savages," she added thoughtfully.

"They would be interesting," I suggested drily.

She looked at me. "My good friend, doctor, you are right," she said
charmingly. "More interesting than this company. Monsieur 'Olgate, he
is interesting, is it not?"

"We may have an opportunity of judging presently," said I lightly.

Mademoiselle got up and peered out of the port-holes. The glow of the
electric light in the luxurious saloon threw into blueness the stark
darkness of the evening. Nothing was visible, but through the ports
streamed the cadences of the water rising and falling about the hull.
It had its picturesque side, that scene, and looked at with sympathetic
eyes the setting was romantic, whatever tragedy might follow. That it
was to be tragedy I was assured, but this pretty, emotional butterfly
had no such thoughts. Why should she have? She was safeguarded by the
prince of a regnant line; she was to be the mistress of millions; and
she could coquette at will in dark corners with handsome officers. She
was bored, no doubt, and when dominoes with her maid failed her, she
had Barraclough to fall back on, and there was her art behind all if
she had only an audience. I began to see the explanation of that
astonishing scene earlier in the day. She was vain to her finger-tips;
she loved sensations; and it was trying even to be the betrothed of a
royal prince if divorced from excitements to her vanity. After all,
Prince Frederic, apart from his lineage, was an ordinary mortal, and
his conversation was not stimulating. In Germany or in Paris
Mademoiselle would have footed it happily as the consort even of a
dethroned prince; but what was to be got out of the eternal wash and
silence of the ocean, out of the sea, sea, sea, as she herself phrased
it?

She came back from the port-hole. "It is so dull," she said, and yawned
politely. Well, it was dull, but perhaps dulness was more pleasant than
the excitements which we were promised. With a flirt of her eyes she
left us.

When she was gone Barraclough eyed me coldly and steadily.

"You didn'