Dunham felt far from content, and regarded the poultry with silent disappointment. “Are you fond of pets?” he asked, after a while. “Yes, I used to have pet chickens when I was a little thing.” “You ought to adopt one of these,” suggested Dunham. “That white one is a pretty creature.” “Yes,” said Lydia. “He looks as if he were Leghorn. Leghorn breed,” she added, in reply to Dunham's look of inquiry. “He's a beauty.” “Let me get him out for you a moment!” cried the young man, in his amiable zeal. Before Lydia could protest, or the cook interfere, he had opened the coop-door and plunged his arm into the tumult which his manoeuvre created within. He secured the cockerel, and drawing it forth was about to offer it to Lydia, when in its struggles to escape it drove one of its spurs into his hand. Dunham suddenly released it; and then ensued a wild chase for its recapture, up and down the ship, in which it had every advantage of the young man. At last it sprang upon the rail; he put out his hand to seize it, when it rose with a desperate screech, and flew far out over the sea. They watched the suicide till it sank exhausted into a distant white-cap. “Dat's gone,” said the cook, philosophically. Dunham looked round. Half the ship's company, alarmed by his steeple-chase over the deck, were there, silently agrin. Lydia did not laugh. When he asked, still with his habitual sweetness, but entirely at random, “Shall we--ah--go below?” she did not answer definitely, and did not go. At the same time she ceased to be so timidly intangible and aloof in manner. She began to talk to Dunham, instead of letting him talk to her; she asked him questions, and listened with deference to what he said on such matters as the probable length of the voyage and the sort of weather they were likely to have. She did not take note of his keeping his handkerchief wound round his hand, nor of his attempts to recur to the subject of his mortifying adventure. When they were again quite alone, the cook's respect having been won back through his ethnic susceptibility to silver, she remembered that she must go to her room. “In other words,” said Staniford, after Dunham had reported the whole case to him, “she treated your hurt vanity as if you had been her pet schoolboy. She lured you away from yourself, and got you to talking and thinking of other things. Lurella is deep, I tell you. What consummate tacticians the least of women are! It's a pity that they have to work so often in such dull material as men; they ought always to have women to operate on. The youngest of them has more wisdom in human nature than the sages of our sex. I must say, Lurella is magnanimous, too. She might have taken her revenge on you for pitying her yesterday when she sat in that warehouse door on the wharf. It was rather fine in Lurella not to do it. What did she say, Dunham? What did she talk about? Did she want to know?” “No!” shouted Dunham. “She talked very well, like any young lady.”