etters from Iris
became fewer and more fragmentary as David's imagination failed, and
his excuses grew thinner.

And the odd thing was that if David had only known it, he could have
saved himself all this heart-burning and misery by looking through the
dining-room window on that Sunday afternoon when his prospects seemed
to be so rosy. He never thought of that. He cursed every circumstance
and person impartially and fluently, but he omitted from the Satanic
litany the one girlish prank of tree-climbing that led Iris to spring
out of sight amid the sheltering arms of an elm when her uncle and
Captain Coke deemed the summer-house a suitable place for "a plain talk
as man to man."

So David learnt what it meant to wait, and listen, and start
expectantly when postman's knock or telegraph messenger's imperative
summons sounded on door of house or office.

But he waited long in vain. The _Andromeda_, like her namesake of old,
might have been chained to a rock on some mythical island guarded by
the father of all sea serpents. As for a new Perseus, well--David knew
him not.

CHAPTER II

WHEREIN THE "ANDROMEDA" BEGINS HER VOYAGE

The second officer of the _Andromeda_ was pacing the bridge with the
slow alertness of responsibility. He would walk from port to
starboard, glance forrard and aft, peer at the wide crescent of the
starlit sea, stroll back to port, and again scan ship and horizon.
Sometimes he halted in front of the binnacle lamp to make certain that
the man at the wheel was keeping the course, South 15 West, set by
Captain Coke shortly before midnight. His ears listened mechanically
to the steady pulse-beats of the propeller; his eyes swept the vague
plain of the ocean for the sparkling white diamond that would betoken a
mast-head light; he was watchful and prepared for any unforeseen
emergency that might beset the vessel intrusted to his care. But his
mind dwelt on something far removed from his duties, though, to be
sure, every poet who ever scribbled four lines of verse has found rhyme
and reason in comparing women with stars, and ships, and the sea.

If Philip Hozier was no poet, he was a sailor, and sailors are
notoriously susceptible to the charms of the softer sex. But the only
woman he loved was his mother, the only bride he could look for during
many a year was a mermaid, though these sprites of the deep waters seem
to be frequenting undiscovered haunts since mariners ceased to woo the