"What do you think, Hautefeuille, of this salon and this smoking-room? Isn't it well arranged? This trimming of light, varnished wood--what neat and virile elegance! And this dining-room? And these cabins? One could spend months, years in them. You see, each one with its separate toilet-room." And he led on his companion and the young girl herself. He remembered everything, with that astonishing memory for objects possessed by natures like his, created for action, adapted to realities; with his habitual self-assurance, he commented upon everything, from the pikes and guns on the middle deck, awaiting the pirates of the South Seas, to the machinery for filling and emptying the baths, and suddenly he asked Miss Marsh this question, singular enough in a passage of that colossal and luxurious toy which seemed to sum up the grand total of all inventions for the refinement of life:-- "Miss Flossie, may we see the death chamber?" "If it would interest M. Hautefeuille," said Florence Marsh, who had not ceased to regret her thoughtless remark. "My uncle had an only daughter," she continued, "who was named Marion, after my poor aunt. You know that Mr. Marsh, who lost his wife when he was very young, named his town after her, Marionville. My cousin died four years ago. My uncle was almost insane with grief. He wished nothing to be altered in the room she occupied on the yacht. He put her statue in it, and she has always around her the flowers she loved in life. Wait, look, but do not go in." She opened the door, and the young men saw, by the light of two blue-shaded lamps, a room all draped in faded pink. It was filled with a profusion of small objects such as might be possessed by a spoiled child of a railroad magnate--a toilet case of silver and gold, jewels in glass boxes, portraits in carved frames--and in the centre, on a real bed of inlaid wood, lay the statue of the dead girl, white, with closed eyelids, the lips slightly parted, among sheaves of carnations and of orchids. The silence of this strange shrine, the mystery, the delicate perfume of the flowers, the unlooked-for poetry of this posthumous idolatry, in the boat of a yachtsman and a man of business, would, in any other circumstances, have appealed to the romanticism innate in Pierre Hautefeuille's heart. But during all this visit he had had but one thought,--to escape from Miss Marsh and Corancez, to be alone in order to reflect upon the evidence, so painfully unexpected, that his deepest secret had been discovered. So it was a relief to depart from the boat, and still a torture to have the company of his friend a few minutes longer.