“You cover your meaning with a jest--but I am too much in earnest. I wish to be your friend. You must not seek to interfere with Miralda’s marriage.” “Your pardon, but we are really getting too personal. Let me suggest that we wait to discuss that lady until she is present. Ah, here they are,” I exclaimed, catching sight of them. And then I had a little thrust at Inez. “And you are fortunate, too. Lieutenant de Linto is with them.” I knew how he must bore her; and she did not succeed in disguising her chagrin. She had admitted that she had come as a sort of watchdog; and the punishment fitted the crime so aptly that I grinned. Nor was that to be her only punishment, as matters turned out. The skipper proved a true weather prophet, and Inez was a desperately bad sailor. She played her watchdog part cleverly; but it was entirely superfluous. All the delightful anticipations I had indulged in were killed by Miralda herself, whose conduct perplexed me far more than on the previous night. Almost from the moment her dainty foot touched the _Stella’s_ deck, she acted in a manner I could not have deemed possible. She was very bright and laughed and talked as if there were no such thing in the world as care and trouble. She treated me as if I were a mere acquaintance whom she was just pleased to meet again. Nothing more. But it was not that which so pained me. She spoke freely of her visit to Paris, referring now to her mother and again to me in regard to little episodes of the time there, and doing it all without a suggestion of restraint. Then in a hard tone and with jarring half-boastful laughter, she began to jest about her conquests. She named several men, who, as I knew, had admired her; mimicked their ways, ridiculed their attentions, and freely admitted that she had flirted with them, because “one must amuse oneself.” If any man had told me that she was capable of such conduct I think I should have knocked him down. But I heard it all myself. I could scarcely believe my own eyes and ears. The last belief in the back of my mind was that she could be the callous, heartless coquette she was showing herself, luring men to her by her beauty only to laugh at them for believing in her, and descending to the depths of talking about it to others in a vein of self-glorification. The luncheon gong interrupted but did not check her, and as I sat listening in silence she appealed to me more than once to confirm some little ridiculous trait of some one or other of the men she had “scalped.” Inez saw and rejoiced at my discomfiture, but retribution was at hand for her. When we sat down to luncheon the sea was as smooth as the table-cloth, but when we reached the deck again the weather had changed and a heavy bank of clouds to the south threatened a capful of wind. And even this served to show Miralda in a new light. She heard me tell the skipper to return. “Is it going to be rough? I hope so. I love a rough sea. Don’t go back yet.”