“Pink-cheeked Ambrose, rosy-fingered Ambrose, continent Ambrose, I don’t reconcile anything. I am the only man in this ship who doesn’t reconcile his ideas with one another, the only one who isn’t a blasted walking logic, the only one——” He stopped and patted Ambrose on the shoulder. “Come on; let’s go up on deck. I forgot I’m a Sage. The trouble is, you know, Ambrose, that, I mean to say—I shouldn’t mind if it wasn’t Lychnis. He can do what he likes about Ruby, but when it’s Lychnis—— She’s too good to be seduced by anybody but a winged, frowning Eros, and there aren’t such things. What time is it? She and Frew-Gaff and I are going to begin a new series of calculations to-night. The wonder that girl is, Ambrose! She feels about mathematics the way some people feel about flowers. She told me once that formulæ bud and blossom for her like roses. She’s all rhythm, that girl. She has the most astonishing perceptions about physical reality, and all unknowingly. It’s my belief that with just a little more she’ll find herself accidentally in possession of some extraordinary secret. She has something in her that no one else in this ship understands, something mysterious, insight—I don’t know what to call it—and she is unconscious of it. The wonder! The darling! Put that down in your notebooks and ponder it. I can see in your eye that you are composing sentences as I go along, you soulless, metal-minded register.” Ambrose remarks that he couldn’t do better than record the conversation as it fell. 5 Presently they were on deck. They found Quentin with Lychnis and Ruby (in cloaks of emerald and rose respectively, with glimmering shoes), showing off his bushy beard and his heroic figure in the light of a yellow rose-leaf moon. The ship was moving gently in the foam-flowering fields of the sea. Above them, against a swaying almond-tree of stars, could be seen the head of a seaman looking over the canvas of the navigating bridge. There was no sound but the sound of the sea and Quentin’s rich voice and the girls’ laughter. “Five-and-twenty past nine, Lychnis,” said Fulke. “Oh, bother!” She frowned. But the thought of the calculations, once planted in her consciousness, began to attract her. “I’ll come,” she said; and chose to descend to the lower deck by an iron ladder that the sailors used in passage from foc’s’le to bridge. She vanished into the darkness like some faint emerald emanation. “And your mother wants you, Ruby,” said Ambrose. The rose emanation went slowly and sulkily after the emerald, and Ambrose delivered his message on the subject of mutiny with a gesture towards a light that outlined a door in the swaying foc’s’le.