I turned on my heel to leave him, but reckoned without the tremendous wave which swung lazily up to the boat, smote it, held it suspended a breathless moment, and then let it down again with unparalleled suddenness. My husband's arm intervened between me and the rail, checking my mad career in mid-air. "Steady on," he said. "We've not reached tropical waters yet." There was nothing to do but take his proffered arm and walk on, in haughty silence. We sat at the Captain's table, and for the greater part of the trip we and the Captain sat there alone. No, not quite alone, for at the Captain's right sat the prettiest girl I have ever seen. We met her the first day out, and it was not long before she had attached herself to our party. Peter, always susceptible to beauty, caused me not a few pangs of jealousy before the trip was over. And Miss Mercedes Howell, for such was her mismated name, seemed to find much in common with my husband. She had thought at first, she confided to me naïvely, that the Doctor and I must be brother and sister despite the passenger list, and at all events, we must have been married a long, long time--was it not so, dear Mrs. Denton? On my stately assurance that I had been married less than a week, her enormous black eyes flew open to their widest. I changed the subject. Miss Howell, so her vivacious chatter informed us, was returning to Havana after a period of college. I gathered that by the edict of the faculty she had gone through Vassar in two years instead of the prescribed four. "Oh, but it was dull," she told us at the table, with melting, melancholy eyes. "No young men! Nothing! Just stupid books and rules--rules--rules!! It was like prison! Imagine!" And she looked brightly about the board for sympathy. If I had a momentary sense of sympathy, it was for the faculty, but evidently my husband and the Captain felt otherwise. Mercedes, as she insisted I should call her, extending the courtesy to the entire family, and, as a matter of course, addressing me as Mavis and the remainder of the party as Peter and Bill, was the daughter of a wealthy American, settled in Cuba with a Spanish wife. She was twenty, and on returning to Cuba, was to make her debut. I was tremendously interested by her vivid account of Cuban Society, and went to bed each night with my head a whirl of horse races, and parties and country clubs and motor trips.