ng and
send it to Mr. Smithson when you go back to England.'

'Send it to him yourself. I will have nothing to do with it.'

'How dreadfully disagreeable you are,' said Lesbia, pouting, 'just
because I am marrying to please myself, instead of to please you. It is
frightfully selfish of you.'

Montesma came in at this moment. He, too, had dressed himself freshly,
and was looking his handsomest, in that buccaneer style of costume which
he wore when he sailed the yacht. He and Lesbia breakfasted at their
ease, while Lady Kirkbank reclined in her bamboo arm-chair, feeling very
unhappy in her mind and far from well. Neptune and she could not
accommodate themselves.

After a leisurely breakfast, enlivened by talk and laughter, the cabin
windows open, the sun shining, the freshening breeze blowing in, Lesbia
and Don Gomez went on deck, and he reclined at her feet while she read
to him from the pages of her favourite Keats, read languidly, lazily,
yet exquisitely, for she had been taught to read as well as to sing. The
poetry seemed to have been written on purpose for them; and the sky and
the atmosphere around them seemed to have been made for the poetry. And
so, with intervals of strolling on the deck, and an hour or so dawdled
away at luncheon, and a leisurely afternoon tea, the day wore on to
sunset, and they went back to Keats, while Lady Kirkbank sulked and
slept in a corner of the saloon.

'This is the happiest day of my life,' Lesbia murmured, in a pause of
their reading, when they had dropped Endymion's love to talk of their
own.

'But not of mine, my angel. I shall be happier still when we are far
away on broader waters, beyond the reach of all who can part us.'

'Can any one part us, Gomez, now that we have pledged ourselves to each
other?' she asked, incredulously.

'Ah, love, such pledges are sometimes broken. All women are not
lion-hearted. While the sea is smooth and the ship runs fair, all is
easy enough; but when tempest and peril come--that is the test, Lesbia.
Will you stand by me in the tempest, love?'

'You know that I will,' she answered, with her hand locked in his two
hands, clasped as with a life-long clasp.

She could not imagine any severe ordeal to be gone through. If
Maulevrier heard of her elopement in time for pursuit, there would be a
fuss, perhaps--an angry bother raging and fuming. But what of that? She
was her own mistress. Maulevrier could not prevent her marrying
whomsoever she