to be seen at rest considering the waters, or grimacing behind a wave. Presently Sir Richard, discovering where they were, commanded them with tones of displeasure into the boat. Ruby, who had only done what her friend ordered, obeyed, and Lychnis, stopping first to nose under the stern as if she were a whale, followed. “This is really not very sensible,” he said, with an eye on their vascular systems. “Down below at once and get dressed.” Lychnis stood on the deck for a moment consulting her inward heart. With her it was not a question of obeying or not obeying. In all matters she followed some secret and rhythmic way that unfolded itself to her at a suitable time. Ambrose transfers a sketch of her, standing there in her plum-coloured bathing dress, to his white pages. He discusses her head, shown against sky and sea, as a subtle and beautiful relation of browns and ambers and pinks. Her eyes were a surprising brown, greenish in face of the light, and her eyelashes made a line of blackish purple when the eyelids were lowered. Her hair seemed amber, light amber to brown, but often it held coppery lights too, and a sort of deep heliotrope sheen and shadow, as now, against sunset. The bloom of her skin, he says, was too delicate to injure with human language—he only indicates a flush of health under the tan of sun and voyage, and a vividness of colouring that came when her feelings were high. He does tell us that her mouth utterly satisfied the mind, with its pink deeper than coral, and a stain of some still richer hue—he never can decide what it is, and vermilion-purple is the nearest he can come to it. She had a way of turning up the corners of her mouth at him. Ruby called it making a fox-face. Then he speaks, geometrically, of certain curves which presented her to notice as a young woman. He makes more than a score of attempts, one time and another, to convey the movement and fine beauty of those curves, to describe certain relations between one part of her and another. She replied to Sir Richard, showing small, sharp teeth and umber shadows in the delicious cavern of her mouth: “I couldn’t help it. There’s something funny in the afternoon, or in the sea—something that makes one feel dreamy.” He smiled indulgently at her. “What does it make you dream of, visionary, yet not unpractical Lychnis?” She answered his smile. “Do you remember the seascape in some dessert-plates of daddy’s at home? They came from Asia, I think—old, buried Asia. I thought I had got melted into that picture.” Ruby, willing and adoring slave of the finer girl, never venturing to move without her except under orders, called from the companion-way: “Do come, Licky darling.” And Licky, her inward heart at that moment speaking, did not refuse. But she repeated to Sir Richard, as she went off: “I believe we have got melted into a picture. We are going to have an adventure in a dessert-plate.”