will let her walk along the beach with you once in a while, it will do her a sight of good, and give her an appetite--although what I want her to hev an appetite for I am sure I don't know; for ef she gets well, of course she'll go back to the convent. Want to go? _That_ she does. She loves the place, and feels lost and strange anywhere else. She was taken there when she was a baby, and it is all the home she has. _She_ doesn't know they wanted to be red of her, and she wouldn't believe it ef I was to tell her forty times. She loves them all dearly, and prays every day to go back there. Spanish? Yes, I suppose so; she don't know herself what she is exactly. She speaks English well though, don't she? Yes, Sister St. Luke is her name; and a heathenish name it is for a woman, in my opinion. _I_ call her Miss Luke. Convert her? Couldn't any more convert her than you could convert a white gull, and make a land bird of him. It's his nature to ride on the water and be wet all the time. Towels couldn't dry him--not if you fetched a thousand!" "Our good hostess is a woman of discrimination, and sorely perplexed, therefore, over her _protégée_," said Keith, as the two young men sought their room, a loft under the peaked roof, which was to be their abode for some weeks, when they were not afloat. "As a nurse she feels a professional pride in curing, while as a Calvinist she would almost rather kill than cure, if her patient is to go back to the popish convent. But the little Sister looks very fragile. She will probably save trouble all round by fading away." "She is about as faded now as a woman can be," answered Carrington. The two friends, or rather companions, plunged into all the phases of the southern ocean with a broad, inhaling, expanding delight which only a superb natural or an exquisitely cultured physique can feel. George Carrington was a vigorous young Saxon, tall and broad to a remarkable degree, feeling his life and strength in every vein and muscle. Each night he slept his eight hours dreamlessly, like a child, and each day he lived four hours in one, counting by the pallid hours of other men. Andrew Keith, on the other hand, represented the physique cultured and trained up to a high point by years of attention and care. He was a slight man, rather undersized, but his wiry strength was more than a match for Carrington's bulk, and his finely cut face, if you would but study it, stood out like a cameo by the side of a ruddy miniature painted in oils. The trouble is that but few people study cameos. He was older than his companion, and "One of those quiet fellows, you know," said the world. The two had never done or been anything remarkable in all their lives. Keith had a little money, and lived as he pleased, while Carrington, off now on a vacation, was junior member of a firm in which family influence had placed him. Both were city men.