of his partiality to her.

X

When they left the breakfast table the first morning of the rough
weather, Breckon offered to go on deck with Miss Kenton, and put her
where she could see the waves. That had been her shapeless ambition,
dreamily expressed with reference to some time, as they rose. Breckon
asked, "Why not now?" and he promised to place her chair on deck where
she could enjoy the spectacle safe from any seas the boat might ship.
Then she recoiled, and she recoiled the further upon her father's
urgence. At the foot of the gangway she looked wistfully up the reeling
stairs, and said that she saw her shawl and Lottie's among the others
solemnly swaying from the top railing. "Oh, then," Breckon pressed her,
"you could be made comfortable without the least trouble."

"I ought to go and see how Lottie is getting along," she murmured.

Her father said he would see for her, and on this she explicitly
renounced her ambition of going up. "You couldn't do anything," she
said, coldly.

"If Miss Lottie is very sea-sick she's beyond all earthly aid," Breckon
ventured. "She'd better be left to the vain ministrations of the
stewardess."

Ellen looked at him in apparent distrust of his piety, if not of his
wisdom. "I don't believe I could get up the stairs," she said.

"Well," he admitted, "they're not as steady as land--going stairs." Her
father discreetly kept silence, and, as no one offered to help her, she
began to climb the crazy steps, with Breckon close behind her in latent
readiness for her fall.

From the top she called down to the judge, "Tell momma I will only stay
a minute." But later, tucked into her chair on the lee of the bulkhead,
with Breckon bracing himself against it beside her, she showed no
impatience to return. "Are they never higher than that" she required
of him, with her wan eyes critically on the infinite procession of the
surges.

"They must be," Breckon answered, "if there's any truth in common
report. I've heard of their running mountains high. Perhaps they used
rather low mountains to measure them by. Or the measurements may
not have been very exact. But common report never leaves much to the
imagination."

"That was the way at Niagara," the girl assented; and Breckon obligingly
regretted that he had never been there. He thought it in good taste that
she should not tell him he ought to go. She merely said, "I was there
once with poppa," and did not press her advantage. "Do th