"Chésy is simply the husband of a very pretty woman," said Madame de Carlsberg. "Everything is permitted to those husbands on account of their wives, and they become spoilt children. You are going down? I shall remain on deck. Send us tea here, will you? I say us, for I shall keep you for company," she continued, turning to Hautefeuille. "I know Chésy. Now that the race is over he will proceed to act as the proprietor of the yacht. Happily, I shall protect you. Sit here." And she motioned to a chair beside her own, with that tender and imperious grace by which a woman who loves, but is obliged to restrain herself before others, knows how to impart all the trembling passion of the caress she cannot give. Lovers like Pierre Hautefeuille obey these orders in an eager, almost religious, way which makes men smile, but not the women. They know so well that this devotion in the smallest things is the true sign of an inward idolatry. So neither Miss Marsh nor Madame Bonnacorsi thought of jesting at Hautefeuille's attitude. But while retiring, with that instinctive complicity with which the most virtuous women have for the romance of another, they said:-- "Corancez was indeed right. How he loves her!" "Yes, he is happy to-day; but to-morrow?" But to-morrow? He had no thought for the mysterious and dangerous morrow of all our peaceful to-days. The _Jenny_, free of her antagonists, continued with her rapid and cradling motion over this velvet sea. The _Dalilah_ and the _Albatross_ were already faint in the blue distance, where the coast also was disappearing. A few more strokes of the engines, a few more turns of the screw, and there would be nothing around them but the moving water, the motionless sky, and the sinking sun. The end of a beautiful winter day in Provence is really divine during that hour before the chill of evening has touched the air and darkened the sea and land. Now that the other guests of the yacht had gone down to the dining-room, it seemed as though the two lovers were all alone in the world on a floating terrace, amid the shrubbery and the perfume of flowers. One of the boat's servants, a kind of agile and silent genius, had placed the small tea-table beside them, with a complicated little apparatus of silver, on which, as well as on the cups and plates, was the fantastic coat of arms adopted by Marsh--the arch of a bridge over a swamp, "arch on Marsh"--this pun, in the same taste as that in which the boat had been baptized, was written under the scutcheon. The bridge was in or, the marsh in sable, on a field of gules. The American cared nothing for heraldic heresies. Black, red, and yellow were the colors of the deck awning, and this scutcheon and device signified that his railroad, celebrated in fact for the boldness of its viaducts, had saved him from misery, here represented by the marsh. Naïve symbolism which would have typified even more justly the arch of dreams thrown by the two lovers over all the mire of life.