Once or twice we had word from our runagates. The fury of the sea having subsided after they had left Bordeaux, they had settled down to the normal life of shipboard, and Jaffery took his turn with the hands, coiled ropes, sweated over cargo, and kept his watch. Liosha, we were given to understand, besides helping in the galley and the cabin and swabbing decks, found much delight in painting the ship's boats with paint which Jaffery had bought for the purpose at Bordeaux. She had struck up a friendship with the first mate, who, possessing a camera, had taken their photographs. They sent us one of the two standing side by side, and a more villainous-looking yet widely smiling pair you could not wish to see. Both wore sailors' caps and jerseys and sea-boots, and Barbara's keen eye detected the fact that Liosha, for freedom's sake, had cut a foot or so off the bottom of her skirt without taking the trouble to hem up the edge, which, now frayed, hung about her calves in disgraceful fringes. "I think you were wrong, my dear," said I. "The poor thing looks anything but utterly miserable." "I'm sure I was right about her hands and skin," she maintained. "Well, it's her own skin." "More's the pity," Barbara retorted. What on earth she meant, I do not know; but, as usual, she had the last word. The middle of September found us back in England, and shortly afterwards Doria returned also, and resumed her lonely life in the Adrian-haunted flat. But by and by she grew restless, complaining that no one but her father, of whose society she had wearied, was in town, and went off on a series of country-house visits. The flat, I suspected, for all its sacred memories, was dull without Jaffery. She still maintained her unrelenting attitude, and spoke scornfully of him; but once or twice she asked when this mad voyage would be over, thereby betraying curiosity rather than indifference.