and
eyes), but this morning, when I sprang at her out of the bath-room, like
a young tigress escaped from its cage on its ruthless way to a
motor-boat, she looked so piteous and yielding, that I felt I could
carry her--and my point at the same time--half across the world.

She had made cream eggs for breakfast, poor darling (I could have sobbed
on them), and actually coffee for me, because she knows I love it. I
didn't worry her any more until an egg and a cup of tea were on duty to
keep her strength up, and then I poured plans, which I made as I went
on, upon her meekly protesting head.

The boat, it appeared, lay in Holland, which fact, as I pointed out to
Phil, was another sign that Providence had set its heart upon our using
her; for we've always wanted to see Holland. We often said, if we ever
took a holiday from serials and the type-writer, we would go to Holland;
but somehow the time for holidays and Holland never seemed to arrive.
Now, here it was; and it would be _the_ time of our lives.

Poor Captain Noble meant to use the boat himself this summer, but he was
taken ill late in the season on the Riviera and died there. It was from
Mentone that Mrs. Keithley wrote what was being said among his friends
about a huge legacy for us; and we, poor deluded ones, had believed.

Captain Noble, a dear old retired naval officer, was a friend of
Phyllis's father since the beginning of the world, and, though Phil was
sixteen and I fifteen when our respective parents (widowed both, ages
before) met and married, the good man took my mother also to his heart.
Phil and I have been alone in the world together now for three years;
she is twenty-two, I twenty-one. Though many moons have passed since we
saw anything of Captain Noble except picture postcards, we were not
taken entirely by surprise when we heard that he had left us a large
legacy. It is easy to get used to nice things, and far more difficult to
crawl down gracefully from gilded heights.

Crawl we must, however; so I determined it should be into that motor-boat
floating idly on a canal in Holland.

The letter from the solicitor (a French solicitor, or the equivalent,
writing from the Riviera) told us all about the boat and about the
money. The boat must be got by going or sending to Rotterdam, the money
obtained in London.

A thirty horse-power (why not thirty dolphin-power?) motor-boat sounds
very grand to read about; and as I recovered from my first
disappoin