“I shall write and tell him that just because there is a little wife, he must press the idea!” cried Lucy, with shining eyes. “Why, a whole year on the open sea—you, who love it so much and are never sea-sick—it would make a new man of you!” And then her brave heart quailed secretly at the thought of the long absence, and the long silences which lay within it, and she added kindly, “But might you not find it a rough life, Charlie, and lonesome?” Charlie laughed kindly. “I can trust Grant’s ideas of comfort,” he said; “they are quite up to wholesome point, and I want nothing more. He is good company too, and so are sailors generally. I could not bear the thought of any very long journey in a big passenger steamer with strange men, possibly gamblers or drunkards, sharing one’s cabin, the social tone set by the smoking-room and the bar, and possibility of the truly awful solitude of living among two or three hundred people with not one of whom I might have a single idea in common! No, dear little Lucy, if I am to have a really long voyage, give me a sailing vessel, when I can secure such advantage as sailing with Alick Grant.” “But suppose you should be ill?” suggested Lucy in a low voice. “There would be no doctor.” “Suppose I should be ill!” answered Charlie cheerfully. “Grant would see that I was properly taken care of. All that could be done in my case, he knows how to do.” Mr. Challoner paused. “Even so,” he went on; “it would be better for you to think of me as lying quietly in my berth, looked after by an old friend, and an object of genuine interest to all his men, than as I should be on a passenger steamer, with an over-driven steward and stewardess running in and out, dancing going on overhead, and sounds of comic songs coming from the saloon. No, I should not like to run risks of serious illness on a big passenger steamer,” he decided. He did not remind Lucy—but she remembered, though she kept silence—that in the one lengthy ocean voyage he had ever enjoyed—a business trip to and from New York—a passenger had met a frightful death by accident in the steamer’s saloon, and two days afterwards a flippant “charade” had been enacted, with every circumstance of levity, on the very spot. “What did you think, Charlie, when you first got that letter?” asked his wife. “Did you wish you could go?” Her husband shook his head. “We do not wish for what we believe to be absolutely impossible,” he said. “As I say, I never gave it another thought till you brought out your plans this afternoon. I did not tell you a word about it, because I thought the suggestion would only worry you, when it could not be carried out.” “But you see now that it could be done,” said Lucy bravely.