‘Time! You have all to-morrow. You may easily be on board by four o’clock in the afternoon on the following day. Time! A sailor knows nothing of time. I must have you by my side, Charlie. We shall meet them, and I shall need a friend. The support and help of your company, too----’ ‘Will your yacht be ready for sea by the day after to-morrow?’ ‘She is ready now.’ ‘Your people will have worked expeditiously,’ said I, fencing a little, for he was leaning towards me and devouring me with his eyes, and I found it impossible to say yes or no right off. ‘Will you come?’ ‘How many form your party?’ ‘There is myself, there is Laura, then you, then a maid for my sister-in-law, and my man, and yours if you choose to bring him.’ ‘In short, there will be three of us,’ said I; ‘no doctor?’ ‘We cannot be too few. What would be the good of a doctor? Will you come?’ ‘Do you sleep in town to-night?’ ‘Yes,’ he replied, naming a hotel near Charing Cross. ‘Well, then, Wilfrid,’ said I, ‘you must give me to-night to think the thing over. What are your plans for to-morrow?’ ‘I leave for Southampton at ten. Laura arrives there at six in the evening.’ ‘Then,’ said I, ‘you shall have my answer by nine o’clock to-morrow morning. Will that do?’ ‘It _must_ do, I suppose,’ said he wearily, moving as if to rise, and casting a dull, absent sort of look at his watch. A quarter of an hour later I was alone. CHAPTER II. THE ‘BRIDE.’ Time was when I had been much thrown with my cousin. I had served in the Royal Navy for a few years, as I have said, but abandoned it on my inheriting a very comfortable little fortune from my father, who survived my mother a few months only. I say I quitted the sea then, partly because I was now become an independent man, partly because I was comparatively without influence and so found the vocation unpromising, and partly because my frizzling equatorial spells of service had fairly sickened me of the life. It was then that Wilfrid, who was a bachelor, and my senior by some ten years or thereabouts, invited me down to Cumberland, where I hunted and shot with him and passed some merry weeks. He took a great liking to me, and I was often with him, and we were much together in London. There came a time, however, when he took it into his head to travel. He thought he would go abroad and see the world; not Paris, Brussels, and Rome, but America and the Indies and Australia--a considerable undertaking in those ambling days of the tea waggon and the cotton kettle-bottom, when the passage from the Thames to Bombay occupied four months, and when a man who had made a voyage round the world believed he had a right to give himself airs.