ooking, if possible, more beautiful
than she had done under the most favourable of terrestrial
circumstances. There was a something else too, which she didn't
altogether like to see, a sort of resignation to her fate which, in a
young lady situated as she was then, Mrs. Van Stuyler considered to be
distinctly improper.

"It is rather startling, isn't it?" she said, with hardly a trace of
emotion in her voice; "but I have no doubt that everything will be all
right in the end."

"Everything all right, my dear Zaidie! What on earth, or I might say
under heaven, do you mean?"

"I mean," replied Zaidie even more composedly than before, and also with
a little tightening of her lips, "that Lord Redgrave is the owner of
this vessel, and that therefore it is quite impossible that anything out
of the way could happen to us--I mean anything more out of the way than
this wonderful jump from the sea to the sky has been, unless, of course,
Lord Redgrave is going to take us for a voyage among the stars."

"Zaidie Rennick!" said Mrs. Van Stuyler, bridling up into her most
frigid dignity, "I am more than surprised to hear you talk in such a
strain. Perfectly safe, indeed! Has it not struck you that we are
absolutely at this man's--this Lord Redgrave's, mercy, that he can take
us where he likes, and treat us just as he pleases?"

"My dear Mrs. Van," replied Zaidie, dropping back into her familiar form
of address, but speaking even more frigidly than her chaperon had done,
"you seem to forget that, however extraordinary our situation may be
just now, we are in the care of an English gentleman. Lord Redgrave was
a friend of my father's, the only man who believed in his ideals, the
only man who realised them, the only man----"

"That you were ever in love with, eh?" said Mrs. Van Stuyler with a snap
in her voice. "Is that so? Ah, I begin to see something now."

"And I think, if you possess your soul in patience, you will see
something more before long," snapped Miss Zaidie in reply. Then she
stopped abruptly and the flush on her cheek deepened, for at that moment
Lord Redgrave came up the companion way from the lower deck carrying a
big silver tray with a coffee pot, three cups and saucers, a rack of
toast, and a couple of plates of bread and butter and cake.

Just then a sort of social miracle happened. The fact was that Mrs. Van
Stuyler had never before had her early coffee brought to her by a peer
of the British Realm. She thoug