ation for ladies."

Jaffery threw up a hand. "But she's not a lady--in your silly old sailor
sense of the term. She's a hefty savage like me. When you had me aboard,
did you think of having accommodation for a gentleman? Ho! ho! ho! At
any rate," said he, at the end of the peal, "you've a sort of spare
cabin? There's always one."

"A kind of dog-hole--for you, Mr. Chayne."

Jaffery's keen eye caught the Captain's and read things. He jumped to
his feet, upsetting his chair and causing disaster at two adjoining and
crowded tables, for which, dismayed and bareheaded--Jaffery could be a
very courtly gentleman when he chose--he apologized in fluent French,
and, turning, caught Captain Maturin beneath the arm.

"Let us have a private palaver about this."

They threaded their way through the tables to the spaciousness of the
Place Gambetta. Liosha followed them with her glance till they
disappeared; then she looked at me and asked breathlessly:

"Hilary! Do you think he means it?"

"He's demented enough to mean anything," said I.

"But, seriously." She caught my wrist, and only then did I notice that
her hands were bare, her gloves reposing where she had cast them on the
hillside at Etretat. "Did he mean it? I'd give my immortal soul to go."

I looked into her eyes, and if I did not see stick, stark, staring
craziness in them I don't know what stick, stark, staring craziness is.

"Do you know what you're letting yourself in for?" said I, pretending to
believe in her sanity. "Here's a rotten old tub of a tramp--without
another woman on board, with all the inherited smells of all the animals
in Noah's Ark, including the descendants of all the cockroaches that
Noah forgot to land, with a crew of Dagoes and Dutchmen, with awful
food, without a bath, with a beast of an unventilated rabbit-hutch to
sleep in--a wallowing, rolling, tossing, pitching, antiquated parody of
a steamer, a little trumpery cockleshell always wet, always shipping
seas, always slithery, never a dry place to sit down upon, with people
always standing, sixty hours at a time, without sleep, on the bridge to
see that she doesn't burst asunder and go down--a floating--when she
does float--a floating inferno of misery--here it is--I can tell you all
about it--any child in a board school could tell you--an inferno of
misery in which you would be always hungry, always sleepless, always
suffering from indigestion, always wet through, always violently ill and