laid it with a little
gracious gesture on Jan Cuxson's, and he, bending low, gently kissed it.

An artist made the record lightning sketch of his life when in a few
lines he drew the dignity, the despair, and the tenderness of the
girl's face, upon whose brow and above whose heart rested weirdly two
great crimson stains flung by the sun through the coloured windows.

For one brief second her moonlit eyes looked straight into the steady
grey ones; then the heavy lids sank slowly, and the faintest rose
colour swept from brow to chin, causing the artist to murmur to
himself, "The ice floes are breaking!" as, like the gallant gentleman
he was, he tore the sketch slowly across and across.

Two little words had been whispered loud enough to reach the ears
beneath the orange blossom.

"I forgive!"

When he had said it Leonie once more laid her hand upon her irate
husband's arm, and passed out into the sun to be met with the shrill
cheers of the children who flung basketsful of wild flowers upon the
bridal path, and the church was filled with a sound like a swarm of
startled bees.

"Um--um--um!"

CHAPTER XXIV

"Many waters cannot quench love;
neither can floods drown it."--_The Bible_.

The girl kicked aside the jumble of clothes littering the cabin floor,
and bending her head squatted upon the bunk, and incidentally, and quite
indifferently, upon a crepe-de-Chine blouse which badly needed washing,
and casually watched her mother who was scrabbling through a cabin trunk
in a manner reminiscent of a terrier ratting in a hedge.

"Why on earth couldn't you stay on deck?" demanded the mother angrily, as
she lifted the transformation from her brow and heaved it on to the upper
berth, thereby unashamedly exposing a head not unlike a gorse common
devastated by fire.

"I can't find that--oh! here it is. What a state it's in. D'you think
the Chinese man could iron it?"

_That_ was one of those hybrid negliges which can serve its turn as a
bath gown, a bedroom wrap, or, covered with a genuine native-made tinsel
shawl (bought at Teneriffe but made in Birmingham), can pass as an
evening gown in the tropics. The cabin was on one of the liners which,
calling at odd places like Genoa, Naples, Algiers, etc., allows you to
pick up letters brought by the mail boat to Port Said. The inhabitants
of the inner, double berthed black hole, called by courtesy a cabin, were
the mother and her last unmarried daughter who l