Dinah knelt upon a sofa, inclined her face to the cool air of an open porthole, and watched the receding French coast. There lay the villages of Luc and Langrune, a line of lights flickering, misty and irregular, above the shimmer of the sea. Far away in the distance rose one larger light, the signal lantern in the tower of La Delivrande. Dinah watched, automatically. She noted scarcely more than a playgoer, carried away by excitement, notes the scene-painting at the most thrilling situation of a drama. To her, as to a child, the whole world was concentrated under the passion that governed herself. Had Gaston come back? She longed to know this with a longing which one must call to mind her narrow past life, her more than girlish simplicity, rightly to understand. And still she did not attempt to leave the cabin. Her strength, moral and physical, seemed paralysed. How should she make her way, alone, up on deck, search in the darkness for Gaston, ask questions, parry, with a jest, such airy explanation of her husband’s disappearance as might, on all sides, be offered her? A voice, close at her elbow, made her start guiltily. ‘No one in the ladies’ saloon? Well, then, Mrs. Gaston Arbuthnot must have tumbled overboard. Her husband and I have vainly searched the _Princess_ for her.’ Oh, kindly Cassandra! Was no small bit of embroidery tacked on, just at this juncture, over the bare truth? ‘So much for trusting valuable entomological specimens out of one’s own hands!’ ‘Miss Tighe, I am here. I have been trying to get a little warm. Your moth is safe,’ stammered Dinah. She scarcely knew in what fashion the words left her dry and trembling lips. ‘Moth? A country-bred girl like you not to know that a speckled white, although, by luck, we caught him out of hours, is a butterfly! Well, I have brought back our other pair of butterflies, safe and sound.’ Before saying this Cassandra had put on her spectacles and carried her box beneath the doorway lamp. She made a great show of examining its contents, critically, thus allowing Dinah to recover her self-possession, unnoticed. ‘From certain murmurings I overheard among the sailors I believe we, all three, narrowly escaped being abandoned to our fate.’ ‘Mrs. Thorne had begun to think that her husband was on board?’ Dinah’s constrained tone was one of doubt rather than inquiry. ‘My dear, nobody ever knows what Mrs. Thorne thinks. Linda is a charming woman, the pleasantest companion, when she chooses, in the world. But, as the Doctor says, Linda might reason. These electric transitions, from gay to grave, and back to gay again, are embarrassing in a world where the rest of us walk by rule. Linda Thorne is all impulse.’ ‘Ah!’