e of the purgatorial concerts habitual to sea life as
known on board a liner.

CHAPTER II

Jill stood by herself!

Personally I consider as infinitely boring those descriptions written
at length anent the past lives of the characters, male and female,
which go to the building of a novel, so in as few words as possible
will try to outline the years which had brought Jill Carden to the
dreary task of waiting hand and foot upon the whimsies of a neurotic
German woman of great wealth, and still greater disinclination to part
with the smallest coin of any realm she might be travelling through.

Jill, an only child and motherless, had led a glorious care-free
existence.

Adored by her father and her two friends, Moll, otherwise the
Honourable Mary Bingham pronounced Beam, of the neighbouring estate,
and Jack, otherwise Sir John Wetherbourne, Baronet, of the next county,
big brother to Jill and worshipper at the shrine of Moll. Jill was
also loved by all who waited on her, and sought after by not a few on
account of her great wealth, and had laughed her way through seventeen
years of life, to find herself suddenly minus father and money, with
nothing left in fact but an estate mortgaged to the smallest pebble,
and a heart-whole proposition from her chum Moll to "just come over the
wall" and restart laughing her way as her adopted sister through the
bit of life which might stretch from the moment of disaster to such
time that she should find a life companion with whom she could settle
down and live happily ever after!

But although Jill's head was outwardly covered with great plaits of
auburn hair, through which broke riotous, frivolous curls, the inside
held a distinctly active and developed brain, which had acquired the
habit of thinking deeply upon such subjects as woman, wife and
motherhood.

Added to this, which is already quite enough to put out of gear the
life of any girl brought up in convention bound England, she had a
heart as big as her outrageous longing for, and love of adventure,
neither of which bignesses she had so far been able to satisfy.

As I have said this was quite bad enough, but through and above all,
her whole rather exceptional being was desirous of love. Not the shape
which clothes its diseased body in soiled robes of imitation something
at one and elevenpence three farthings per yard, and under ferns in
conservatories, in punts up back-waters, in stifling tea-rooms, hotels,
theatr