‘You once suspected his sanity,’ said I, smiling. ‘Upon my word I cannot persuade myself that such a dial-plate as his covers sound clockwork. He strikes wrongly, I’m sure. He don’t keep true time, Wilf.’ ‘Do you think so really?’ he exclaimed with some anxiety. ‘Do you believe Muffin to be perfectly sound, Miss Jennings?’ said I, giving her a significant glance. ‘I should be very sorry to trust him,’ she answered with a spirited gaze at Wilfrid. The subject dropped; our conversation went to the Indiaman that lay for a little, whilst we sat at the breakfast table, framed in the cabin porthole abreast of us, coming and going with the light reel of the yacht, but whenever set for a moment then the most dainty and lovely image imaginable, like to some small choice wondrous carving in mother-of-pearl of a ship, shot with many subtle complexions of light as though you viewed her through a rainbow of fairy-like tenuity. Then, having talked of her, we passed on to our voyage, till on a sudden a fit of sullenness fell upon Wilfrid, and he became moody; but, happily, I had by this time finished my breakfast, and as I had no notion of an argument, nor of courting one of his hot, reproachful, vexing speeches touching his own anguish and my coldness, I left the table, telling Miss Jennings that she would find her chair, rugs, and novel ready for her on deck when she should be pleased to join me. She arrived alone in about half-an-hour. There was something so fragrant in her presence, so flower-like in her aspect, that she could not approach you but that it was as though she brought a nosegay with her whose perfume had a sweetness for every sense of the body. We had not been long together, yet already I might have guessed what had happened with me by noticing in myself the impatience with which I desired her company, the repeated glances I would send at the companion hatch if I expected her on deck, the very comfortable feeling of satisfaction, the emotion indeed of quiet delight that possessed me when I had her snug by my side in her chair, with no one to break in upon us but Wilfrid, who troubled us very little in this way. I remember this morning when I took the novel off her lap to see what progress she had made in it, thinking, as my glance went in a smile from the mark in the middle of chapter the third to her eyes, in which lay a delicate light of laughter, that before long we should be having the weather of the tropics, the radiant ivory of the equinoctial moon, the dew-laden stillness of the equatorial calm, and that there might come night after night of oceanic repose for us to enjoy--and enjoy alone; but I almost started to the fancy, for it was a sort of secret recantation, a quiet confession of my heart to my reason that though to be sure this voyage was to be viewed as a goose-chase, I was beginning to feel willing that it should not be so brief as I was quite lately trusting it would prove. No wonder the old poets represented love as a