_I may not see thee nor hear thy voice, Hermione; Nothing I ask but to feel thou art there, To share thy ocean, to breathe thy air. So I rejoice, Hermione._ _Thus if I sing one little song, Hermione, 'Tis the cry of the gull swept off on the wind. One soundless sigh of a love that is blind. Forgive my wrong, Hermione._ Hermione read the verses twice through, then stared at the white bulkhead. "Fool!" was her polite comment. There were a great many of these poems, each bearing a different date, and each a souvenir of some port where the _Shark_ had visited. Over a period of three months ran the verses, and not once during that time had the poet been within a quarter of a mile of her to Hermione's knowledge. Once or twice she had caught a glimpse of Applebo's face through her telescope, but never a satisfactory one. Paula was the only one of the girls who had ever seen him at close range; she had come on him face to face in the post-office, but had been quite unable to say whether or not he was good to look at. The verses always came most prosaically through the mail. All three of the sisters had a large correspondence, so that Hermione's corn-coloured letters, with their peculiar calligraphy, had excited no especial comment. Once or twice she had been asked from whom they were. "A darn fool..." Hermione had answered, for which her father, old sinner that he was, saw fit to reprove her. Hermione lay on her bunk and kicked up her heels and read her verses, sometimes with a curling lip when the sentiment impressed her as particularly mushy. Yet, oddly enough, there was a flush glowing darkly through the olive of her cheeks, and any one would have sworn that her eyes were a very velvety tone of black. Once or twice her long, lithe young body squirmed uneasily and her broad forehead clouded as though from displeasure. Certainly, there was, aside from the presumption of the poet in sending her the verses at all, nothing to give offence in Applebo's effusions. All were of the very essence of delicacy, and each carried somewhere in its text a little word of apology. Hermione rose suddenly, flung the leaflets back into the locker, and sat for a moment with brooding eyes and the warm flush burning through her clear, olive skin. The girl never burned nor tanned nor chapped; her complexion preserved invariably its delicacy of tint and texture. "What a lot of rot..." muttered Hermione to herself. "The man's an idiot. If I make him feel like that, why doesn't he come over and kick about it instead of flopping around in that little tub and writing me fathoms of slush? Here's where he gets a little sonnet from his Hermione." With her flush even darker, she reached for her writing block and penned the following epistle:-- SCHOONER-YACHT _Shark_, Shoal Harbour, August fourth. HAROLD APPLEBO, ESQ., Yacht _Daffodil_.