Nicholas, her last port of
call before Jamaica. It was understood that as a preliminary Lord Julian
should report himself to the Deputy-Governor at Port Royal, whence at
need he might have himself conveyed to Tortuga. Now it happened that the
Deputy-Governor's niece had come to St. Nicholas some months earlier on
a visit to some relatives, and so that she might escape the insufferable
heat of Jamaica in that season. The time for her return being now at
hand, a passage was sought for her aboard the Royal Mary, and in view of
her uncle's rank and position promptly accorded.

Lord Julian hailed her advent with satisfaction. It gave a voyage that
had been full of interest for him just the spice that it required
to achieve perfection as an experience. His lordship was one of your
gallants to whom existence that is not graced by womankind is more or
less of a stagnation. Miss Arabella Bishop--this straight up and down
slip of a girl with her rather boyish voice and her almost boyish ease
of movement--was not perhaps a lady who in England would have commanded
much notice in my lord's discerning eyes. His very sophisticated,
carefully educated tastes in such matters inclined him towards the
plump, the languishing, and the quite helplessly feminine. Miss
Bishop's charms were undeniable. But they were such that it would take a
delicate-minded man to appreciate them; and my Lord Julian, whilst of a
mind that was very far from gross, did not possess the necessary degree
of delicacy. I must not by this be understood to imply anything against
him.

It remained, however, that Miss Bishop was a young woman and a lady; and
in the latitude into which Lord Julian had strayed this was a phenomenon
sufficiently rare to command attention. On his side, with his title and
position, his personal grace and the charm of a practised courtier, he
bore about him the atmosphere of the great world in which normally he
had his being--a world that was little more than a name to her, who had
spent most of her life in the Antilles. It is not therefore wonderful
that they should have been attracted to each other before the Royal
Mary was warped out of St. Nicholas. Each could tell the other much upon
which the other desired information. He could regale her imagination
with stories of St. James's--in many of which he assigned himself a
heroic, or at least a distinguished part--and she could enrich his mind
with information concerning this new world to whic