sional sort of
person, who was her understudy once, a year or so ago, when she
thoughtlessly allowed herself to come down with measles.

"Miss Brown never puts 'q' instead of 'a', or gets chapter titles on one
side; and she knows how to make the _loveliest_ curlicues under her
headings. Nobody will ever want me to come back," the poor girl wailed.

"All the better for them, if you're going to blow up, as you are
convinced you will," I strove to console her, as I tried on a
yachting-cap, reduced to two three-farthings from four shillings. But
she merely shuddered. And now, when at last we have shut up the flat,
turned the key upon our pasts, and got irrevocably on board the
"Batavier" boat, which will land us in Rotterdam, she has moaned more
than once, "I feel as if nothing would be the same with us ever, ever
again."

"So do I," I've answered unfeelingly. "And I'm _glad_."

II

This is the first time I have been on a sea-going ship since I crossed
from America with my mother, neither of us dreaming that she would
settle down and give me an Englishman for a stepfather. As for Phil, she
has no memories outside her native land--except early ones of
Paris--and, though she has a natural instinct for the preservation of
her young life, I don't doubt that every motion of the big boat in the
night made her realize how infinitely more decorous it would be to drown
on the "Batavier 4" than in a newfangled motor thing on an obscure
foreign canal.

The Thames we have seen before, in all its bigness and richness and
black ugliness; for on hot summer days we have embarked on certain trips
which would condemn us forever in the eyes of duchesses, countesses, and
other ladies of title I have known serially, in instalments. But we (or
rather, I) chose to reach Holland by water, as it seems a more
appropriate preface to our adventure; and I got Phyllis up before five
in the morning, not to miss by any chance the first sight of the Low
Lands.

We were only just in time, for we hadn't had our coffee and been dressed
many minutes before my eyes caught at a line of land as a drowning
person is supposed to catch at a straw.

"Holland!" said I; which was not particularly intelligent in me, as it
couldn't have been anything else.

There it lay, this stage set for our drama, comedy, tragedy--whatever it
may prove--of which we don't yet know the plot, although we are the
heroines; and now that I'm writing in a Rotterdam hotel