“Well, when Mr. Baring heard I was going to England, he was good enough to promise me employment in his London agency as Spanish correspondent. That will fill in two days a week. The rest I can devote to art. I paint a little, and draw with sufficient promise to warrant study, I am told. Anyhow, I am weary of teaching; I prefer to be a pupil.” “I cannot imagine what the young men of Valparaiso were thinking of to allow a girl like you to slip off in this fashion,” said Christobal with a smile. “Most of them hold firmly to the belief that a wife’s wedding-dress should be made of gilt-edged scrip.” “Poor material—very poor material out of which to construct wedded happiness. And as to my young friend, Isobel? She joins her aunt in London, I hear?” “That is the present arrangement. She means to have a good time, especially in Paris. I should like to live in Paris myself. Dear old smoke-laden London does not appeal so thoroughly to the artist. Yet, I am content—yes, quite content.” “Then you have gained the best thing in the world,” cried the doctor, throwing out his arms expansively. The two became good friends as the voyage progressed. Christobal was exceedingly well informed, and delighted in a thoughtful listener like Elsie. Isobel, tiring at times of the Count, would join in their conversation, and display a spasmodic interest in the topics they discussed. There were only six other passengers, a Baptist missionary and his wife, three mining engineers, and an English globe-trotter, a singular being who appeared to have roamed the entire earth, but whose experiences were summed up in two words—every place he had seen was either “Fair” or “Rotten.” Even Isobel failed to draw him further, and she said one day, in a temper, after a spirited attempt to extract some of his stored impressions: “The man reminds me of one of those dummy books you see occasionally, bound in calf and labeled ‘Gazetteer of the World.’ When you try to open a volume you find that it is made of wood.” So they nicknamed him “Mr. Wood,” and Elsie once inadvertently addressed him by the name. “What do you think of the weather, Mr. Wood?” she asked him at breakfast. He chanced to notice that she was speaking to him. “Rotten,” he said. Perhaps he wondered why Miss Maxwell flushed and the others laughed. But, in actual fact, he was not far wrong in his curious choice of an adjective that morning. Dr. Christobal’s dismal foreboding had been justified on the second day out. Leaden clouds, a sullen sea, and occasional puffs of a stinging breeze from the southwest, offered a sorry exchange for the sunny skies of Chile.