"Oh!" she cried, "if I could be sure! Cécile rejects you ... and you come to me! All of Cécile's rejected suitors come to me. First they want sympathy, then ... more! I'm sick of being _consolatrice_!" Paula had passed with startling abruptness from her breathless silence to an almost passionate vehemence, and as she talked she made fierce little gestures with her hands. Yet her voice was low in pitch and volume. "It is so easy for a man to fall in love with the woman who pets and pities him! Hermione has the right of it; I heard her say a few weeks ago to one of Cécile's despairing swains, 'You had better go to Paula and have your cry out. You can't weep on my shoulder; I've got troubles of my own ... and besides, this is a clean shirt-waist!'" Paula laughed, semi-hysterically. Wood looked rather hurt, but not at all irritated. "That's not quite fair to me, Paula," said he. "I did not try to weep on anybody's shoulder, nor am I coming to you for consolation. I don't need it. The want of it disappeared long ago. It is precisely as if I had never been in love with anybody...." "Oh, Huntington ... are you sure...?" "Positive." "And you really love me?" "I love you with all my heart, Paula. Can't you believe me? And don't you think that you could manage to care yourself just the least bit...?" Paula threw a swift look forward. Her father, a bulky figure, half-swaddled in the fog, was rolling aft in their direction. Behind them, alas! was the ubiquitous man at the wheel. "So you will tell me nothing?" Wood asked. Paula turned to him quickly, caught up his ungloved hand, and squeezed it between her own so tightly that it gave him a stab of pain. "I adore you..." she whispered, then dropped his hand and fled for the companionway. CHAPTER X While these agreeable events were transpiring on the deck overhead, Cécile, warm and luxurious in her bed directly underneath, had been doing some very busy thinking, and had finally, aided to some extent by the muffled but pleasant tones of Wood's voice as it came intermittently through her ventilator, arrived at her decision. This decision was that she had better be a sensible girl and marry Huntington Wood. By this time she had come to fully realise that the undoubted attraction which Applebo could have for her came through an appeal made neither to the heart nor to the mind. It was purely a physical attraction, and its hold was upon her material senses. Cécile was, however, very much alive in her senses. If not the slave to them, she was at least a very indulgent mistress, and the things which they brought her she valued more than the higher attributes of mind. She revelled in all five; bright pageants of colour, exquisite perfumes, whether natural or artificial, music of any sort, from a gipsy band to Bach, a terrapin or canvasback and an old Amontillado, a cold bath on a hot day or a hot bath on a cold one.