"What?" cried Cécile, honestly scandalised. With all of her coquetries Cécile had always drawn her dead-line before the kissing stage. "He kissed me good-bye out there in the water," said Hermione, smiling. "I couldn't help myself. I'm not sure that I would have done so if I could. It was a very diluted kiss and finished under water...." "Hermione! You ought to be ashamed...!" Cécile looked as if she had just been kissed herself. "Well...?" "It wasn't much pay ... considering the service recently rendered. To tell the truth, I was rather crazy about it. I've been kissed under the mistletoe, and under the ear, and under protest, but to be kissed under water is distinctly sensational. Another like it and I would have drowned happy...." "Hermione! ... hush! You shameless hussy!" Cécile was laughing in spite of herself, but she was agitated also. Oddly, in spite of her disapproval, she was conscious of a sudden envy of her younger sister's unaffected naturalness. Hermione had been kissed under circumstances which she found most agreeable, and she did not mind saying so. But Cécile knew well that Hermione would put up a very pretty little fight before she would submit to the same sort of thing again. Still, as an older sister, she felt that she ought to read Hermione a little lesson. In which sophistry there was a certain element of ironic humour which Cécile, being a very feminine woman, was quite unable to appreciate. "You surprise me, my dear," she said, sedately. "Of course, you are merely a child and, as you say, you couldn't very well help yourself. But I wish I had known that this undesired appendage of ours had collected his pay. I would have told him what I thought of it. You seem to think that it was quite right and a gentlemanly sort of performance and all that. But if a man had done that sort of thing to me..." "Rats...!" said Hermione, and went in to console Paula. It was two days after these unpleasant incidents that the _Shark_ sailed into Halifax harbour, arriving at about noon. Exactly four hours later the _Daffodil_ was sighted, blowing in with a damp breeze which had backed into the east and smelt of trouble. "Get under way!" growled Bell. "Keep the scoundrel on the move...." The _Shark_ had already left her forwarding address for Old Point Comfort, a little run of eight or nine hundred miles. She got her anchor shortly after the _Daffodil_ had dropped her own. It is probable that Applebo followed her out and hung on her heels through the night, which was sufficiently clear, for at daylight the news spread over the schooner that the yawl was on the starboard quarter, a mile astern, and as the day advanced, she hauled up abeam, about half a mile distant. All of that day the two vessels were in sight of each other. Toward evening the breeze dropped light, and Bell was wild.