ill you?"

"Well, I will--one," said Lottie.

"It may be two or three; but I'll begin with one. Why do you think a
minister ought to be more serious than other men?"

"Why? Well, I should think you'd know. You wouldn't laugh at a funeral,
would you?"

"I've been at some funerals where it would have been a relief to laugh,
and I've wanted to cry at some weddings. But you think it wouldn't do?"

"Of course it wouldn't. I should think you'd know as much as that," said
Lottie, out of patience with him.

"But a minister isn't always marrying or burying people; and in the
intervals, why shouldn't he be setting them an example of harmless
cheerfulness?"

"He ought to be thinking more about the other world, I should say."

"Well, if he believes there is another world--"

"Why! Don't you?" she broke out on him.

Mr. Breckon ruled himself and continued--"as strenuously and
unquestionably as he ought, he has greater reason than other men for
gayety through his faith in a happier state of being than this. That's
one of the reasons I use against myself when I think of leaving off
laughing. Now, Miss Kenton," he concluded, "for such a close and
slippery nature, I think I've been pretty frank," and he looked round
and down into her face with a burst of laughter that could be heard
an the other side of the ship. He refused to take up any serious topic
after that, and he returned to his former amusement of making her give
herself away.

That night Lottie came to her room with an expression so decisive in her
face that Ellen, following it with vague, dark eyes as it showed itself
in the glass at which her sister stood taking out the first dismantling
hairpins before going to bed, could not fail of something portentous in
it.

"Well," said Lottie, with severe finality, "I haven't got any use
for THAT young man from this time out. Of all the tiresome people, he
certainly takes the cake. You can have him, Ellen, if you want him."

"What's the matter with him?" asked Ellen, with a voice in sympathy with
the slow movement of her large eyes as she lay in her berth, staring at
Lottie.

"There's everything the matter, that oughtn't to be. He's too trivial
for anything: I like a man that's serious about one thing in the
universe, at least, and that's just what Mr. Breckon isn't." She went at
such length into his disabilities that by the time she returned to the
climax with which she started she was ready to clamber into the uppe