Ambrose wrote on his tablet, “Mutiny of the crew.” Then he asked, as usual: “Anything else?” A sound like the collapse of a heart escaped from Sprot. “Mutiny!” he exclaimed, interrupting under compulsion of his feelings—“Mutiny! Don’t you understand? The crew have threatened mutiny. There is—you said so, I think, Lord Sombrewater—there is actual danger.” “Mutiny is likely to be accompanied by violence,” remarked Ambrose. “But, good God!” Sprot burst out, “don’t you see—I——” He met Lord Sombrewater’s eye (he was appealing, of course, to him through the protective ears of Ambrose). “Has it quite been realized that—er—that—er—we have women on board—girls? That——” There was a knock at one of the doors, and he performed what must have given him the sensation of a considerable saltatory feat. He jumped, in brief. But it was Lychnis, in a flowered dressing-gown, with her hair shaken loose to dry. She shrank back a little at sight of Sprot, as a primrose might shrink from a boot. She ran her comb through the waves of hair, making them crackle. “Did I hear you say there’s going to be mutiny?” “That is so,” answered her father. He turned to Sprot. “Thank you for your advice, and, of course, not a word to the women.” Sprot was dismissed, in a condition of uncontrol that Ambrose thought pitiable. Ambrose was asked, by a motion of the hand, to remain. It was the half-hour before dinner that Lord Sombrewater liked to spend with Lychnis. Regularly at seven-thirty o’clock he waited for her to come in from her adjoining room, and very often she did. Within limits his affection for his daughter might be said to be unconsidered. In regard to his daughter there was an abeyance of his deliberate personality. He loved her, in fact. Ambrose tells us that the enjoyment of his wealth and his rank had been first and foremost in the activity of acquiring them, as an end in itself; that it was a new and exquisite gratification to him when he got Lychnis to dower with them. He liked Ambrose to be there during those half-hours, partly because Ambrose gave Lychnis pleasure by his conversation and advice. Ambrose is aware that Lord Sombrewater thought him to be a harmless kind of man. He knows that by a method of his own Lord Sombrewater had formed the opinion, on consideration of his written work, that Ambrose was the man to transmit his daughter’s beauty, in the written word, to posterity. Terence Fitzgerald, who painted for the business those wonderful and inspiring posters of god-like men radiating auras of golden brilliance, was expected, likewise, to transmit her beauty on canvas and in verse; but Terence was not asked in for the half-hour before dinner. Lord Sombrewater had formed the opinion that Terence also was an innocent man, but he was a poet, and the behaviour of a poet was less certainly predictable than that of a white-minded recorder of things done. And, indeed, the innocence of poets, in juxtaposition with the innocence of maidens, is apt to work out