There was a curious silence. Martin Disney was sitting on the other side of his wife’s sofa, where he had been reading selected bits of the _Times_, such portions of the news of men and nations as he fancied might interest her. Allegra was busy with a piece of delicate needlework, and did not immediately reply; but it was she who was first to speak. “How frightened you would have been yesterday evening had you known who was on board the boat,” she said. “I don’t know about being frightened, but he was certainly carrying too much canvas. I told him so this morning.” “What did he say?” “Laughed at me. ‘You sailors never believe that a landsman can sail a ship,’ he said. I wanted to talk to his sailing-master, but he told me he was his own sailing-master. If his ship was doomed to go down, he meant to be at the helm himself.” “That sounds as if he were foolhardy,” said Allegra. “I told him I did not like the rig of his boat, nor the name of his boat, and I reminded him how I saw the _Eurydice_ off Portland with all her canvas spread the day she went down. I was with the Governor of the Prison, a naval man, who had been commander on my first ship, and we stood side by side on the cliff, and watched her as she went by. ‘If this wind gets much stronger, that ship will go down,’ said my old captain, ‘unless they take in some of their canvas.’ And a few hours later these poor fellows had all gone to the bottom. I asked Lostwithiel why he called his boat the _Eurydice_. ‘Fancy,’ he said; he had a fancy for the name. ‘I’ve never forgotten the old lines we used to hammer out when we were boys,’ he said--’Ah, miseram, Eurydicen! anima fugiente vocabat; Eurydicen toto referebant flumine ripæ.’” “I don’t think the name matters, if she is a good boat,” said Allegra, with her calm common sense. “Well, she is, and she isn’t. She is a finer boat than the _Vendetta_; but I’d sooner handle the _Vendetta_ in a storm. There are points about his new boat that I don’t quite like. However, he had her built by one of the finest builders on the Clyde, and it will be hard if she goes wrong. He has given me the _Vendetta_ as a wedding-present--in advance of the event--on condition that I sink her when I’m tired of her; and he said he hoped she’d be luckier to me than she had been to him.”