beneficence and wisdom. Yet he uttered most commonplace regrets
at the delay in a voice provocative of fresh surprise to me. It was low
and gentle, almost too low, yet clear as a bell and touched with a faint
reminiscent twang of old New England.

"And this is the young woman who is guilty of the delay," he concluded my
introduction to his daughter. "Margaret, this is Mr. Pathurst."

Her gloved hand promptly emerged from the fox-skins to meet mine, and I
found myself looking into a pair of gray eyes bent steadily and gravely
upon me. It was discomfiting, that cool, penetrating, searching gaze. It
was not that it was challenging, but that it was so insolently business-
like. It was much in the very way one would look at a new coachman he
was about to engage. I did not know then that she was to go on the
voyage, and that her curiosity about the man who was to be a
fellow-passenger for half a year was therefore only natural. Immediately
she realized what she was doing, and her lips and eyes smiled as she
spoke.

As we moved on to enter the tug's cabin I heard Possum's shivering
whimper rising to a screech, and went forward to tell Wada to take the
creature in out of the cold. I found him hovering about my luggage,
wedging my dressing-case securely upright by means of my little automatic
rifle. I was startled by the mountain of luggage around which mine was
no more than a fringe. Ship's stores, was my first thought, until I
noted the number of trunks, boxes, suit-cases, and parcels and bundles of
all sorts. The initials on what looked suspiciously like a woman's hat
trunk caught my eye--"M.W." Yet Captain West's first name was Nathaniel.
On closer investigation I did find several "N.W's." but everywhere I
could see "M.W's." Then I remembered that he had called her Margaret.

I was too angry to return to the cabin, and paced up and down the cold
deck biting my lips with vexation. I had so expressly stipulated with
the agents that no captain's wife was to come along. The last thing
under the sun I desired in the pet quarters of a ship was a woman. But I
had never thought about a captain's daughter. For two cents I was ready
to throw the voyage over and return on the tug to Baltimore.

By the time the wind caused by our speed had chilled me bitterly, I
noticed Miss West coming along the narrow deck, and could not avoid being
struck by the spring and vitality of her walk. Her face, despite its
firm mould