nes!
_Seventeen_ days at sea! seventeen days and seventeen nights, too--do
not let us forget that--of that deadly nausea, of that unspeakable
sinking of all one's inside to the very depths of creation--of the smell
of boiling oil, and the hot, sick, throbbing of engines!

"I hope," say I, in a voice so small that I hardly recognize it for my
own, "that I shall not be _quite_ as ill all the way as I was crossing
from Calais to Dover; and the steward," continue I, in miserable
meditation, "kept telling me all the while what a fine passage we were
having, too!"

"So we were!"

Another pause. I am still thinking of the horrid theme; living over
again my nearly-forgotten agonies.

"Do you remember," say I, presently, "hearing about that Lady
Somebody--I forget her name--but she was the wife of one
Governor-General of India, and she always suffered so much from
sea-sickness that she thought she should suffer less in a
sailing-vessel, and so returned from India in one, and just as she came
in sight of the shores of England _she died_!"

As I reach this awful climax, I open my eyes very wide, and sink my
voice to a tragic depth.

"The moral is--" says Sir Roger, stopping beside me, laying his hand on
my chair back, and regarding me with a mixture of pain and diversion in
his eyes, "stick to steam!"

CHAPTER XIX.

A heavy foot along the passage, a hand upon the door, a hatted head
looking in.

"Roger," says father, in that laboriously amiable voice in which he
always addresses his son-in-law, "sorry to interrupt you, but could you
come here for a minute--will not keep you long."

"All right!" cries Sir Roger, promptly.

(How _can_ he speak in that flippantly cheerful voice, with the prospect
of seventeen days' sea before him?)

"Now, where did I put my hat, Nancy? did you happen to notice?"

"It is here," say I, picking it up from the window-seat, and handing it
to him with lugubrious solemnity.

As he reaches the door, following father, he turns and nods to me with a
half-humorous smile.

"Cheer up," he says, "it shall not be a sailing-vessel."

He is gone, and I return to my former position, and my former
occupation, only that now--the check of Sir Roger's presence being
removed--I indulge in two or three good hearty groans. To think how the
look of all things is changed since this morning!

As we came home through the fields singing, if any one had given me
three wishes, I should have been puzz