“Diana has come upon deck at last, ‘dressed and in her right mind.’ She is very proud of having been ‘seasick jes’ like white folks.’ She so far asserts her authority as to order Edmonia--who is quite herself again--and me to array ourselves in some special gowns of her personal selection for the captain’s dinner today. It is to be a notable affair and Madame Le Sud is to play a violin solo. They asked me to play also, but I refused, till Madame Le Sud asked me to give ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ with her to play second violin. Think of it! This wonderful musical artist volunteering to ‘play second fiddle’ to a novice like me! But she insists upon liking my rendering of the dear old melody and she has taken the trouble to compose a special second part, which, she generously says, ‘will bring out the beauty’ of my performance. “We expect to make land during tonight, and by day after tomorrow, I’ll mail this letter at Liverpool.” XXXI THE VIEWS AND MOODS OF ARTHUR BRENT _W_hen Dorothy had gone Arthur Brent felt a double necessity for diligence in the ordering of plantation affairs. He realized for the first time what he had done in thus sending Dorothy away. For the first time he began to understand his own condition of mind and the extent to which this woman had become a necessity to his life. Quite naturally, too, her absence and the loss of his daily association with her served to depress him, as nothing else had ever done before. The sensation of needing some one was wholly novel to him, and by no means agreeable. “What if I should never have her with me again--never as _my_ Dorothy?” he reflected. “That may very easily happen. In fact I sent her away in order that it might happen, if it would. Her affection for me is still quite that of a child for one much older than herself. Edmonia does not so regard it, but perhaps she is wrong. Perhaps her conviction that Dorothy the woman loves me even more than Dorothy the child ever did, and that her love will survive acquaintance with other and more attractive men, and other and more attractive ways of life, is born only of her eager desire to have that come about. A year’s absence will not make Dorothy forget me or even love me less than she does now. But how much does she love me now, in very truth? May it not happen that when she returns a year hence she will have given her woman’s heart to some other, bringing back to me only the old, child love unchanged? I must be prepared for that at all events. I must school myself to think of it as a probability without the distress of mind it gives me now. And I must be ready, when it happens, to go away from here at once and take up again my life of strenuous endeavor and absorbing study. I mustn’t let this thing ruin me as it might some weakling in character.”