To which the Scot replied, 'They make no difference to me whatever;' and the remark, Toffy thought, was an extraordinary check to any emotional feeling. Jane got her first letter from Peter dated at Vigo, which peaceful port, with its rows of white houses built along the shore, and its green hill with the ruined castle behind, is a haven where many sea-sick passengers would be. They had had a bit of a tossing, Peter said, in the Bay, and Toffy had been very seedy but was better. The captain was a very good sort of fellow, and full of yarns; his cabin was profusely decorated with foxes' masks and brushes, and a few of his admirers believed that when he was at home he hunted. The unfeeling Scot, who had declined to sympathize with Toffy's sensibility to partings, had turned out to be a very interesting sort of man, and not unamusing. He helped to make the evenings on deck pass rather pleasantly with his stories. If Mr. Dunbar, as he was called, had not had such an amazing Scottish accent Peter would have said that probably the stories were not true. It was a letter such as a schoolboy might have written, but Jane treasured the ill-expressed sentiments as maidens of a bygone age may have treasured their lovers' shields; and although she left the letter lying about on her dressing-table, after the manner of modern young women, it was none the less the dearest possession of her life until the next one arrived. Toffy sat up in his bunk with a horribly bad headache, and wrote a long letter to Mrs. Avory, which he posted at Vigo; and he wrote another letter, not nearly so long, but one which cost him much more time to compose, and addressed it to Miss Kitty Sherard. And this he carefully tore into little pieces one night when the decks were dark and there was no moon overhead; and he watched the small white bits of paper, as they floated away into the black depths of the water, and then he walked up and down the deck until the small hours of the morning, when Peter--one of whose worst qualities was that he always fussed over people he cared about--appeared in pyjamas and overcoat, and asked him sternly if he was trying to get another chill.