“She ought to be,” was Mr. Pike’s reply as he lifted his glance across the smooth swell of sea to the sky. “This ain’t the first time she’s been on the North Atlantic in winter.” He debated a moment, as he studied the sea and sky. “I should say, considering the high barometer, we ought to get a mild gale from the north-east or a calm, with the chances in favour of the calm.” She favoured me with a triumphant smile, and suddenly clutched the rail as the _Elsinore_ lifted on an unusually large swell and sank into the trough with a roll from windward that flapped all the sails in hollow thunder. “The calm has it,” Miss West said, with just a hint of grimness. “And if this keeps up I’ll be in my bunk in about five minutes.” She waved aside all sympathy. “Oh, don’t bother about me, Mr. Pathurst. Sea-sickness is only detestable and horrid, like sleet, and muddy weather, and poison ivy; besides, I’d rather be sea-sick than have the hives.” Something went wrong with the men below us on the deck, some stupidity or blunder that was made aware to us by Mr. Mellaire’s raised voice. Like Mr. Pike, he had a way of snarling at the sailors that was distinctly unpleasant to the ear. On the faces of several of the sailors bruises were in evidence. One, in particular, had an eye so swollen that it was closed. “Looks as if he had run against a stanchion in the dark,” I observed. Most eloquent, and most unconscious, was the quick flash of Miss West’s eyes to Mr. Pike’s big paws, with freshly abraded knuckles, resting on the rail. It was a stab of hurt to me. _She knew_. CHAPTER X. That evening the three men of us had dinner alone, with racks on the table, while the _Elsinore_ rolled in the calm that had sent Miss West to her room. “You won’t see her for a couple of days,” Captain West told me. “Her mother was the same way—a born sailor, but always sick at the outset of a voyage.” “It’s the shaking down.” Mr. Pike astonished me with the longest observation I had yet heard him utter at table. “Everybody has to shake down when they leave the land. We’ve got to forget the good times on shore, and the good things money’ll buy, and start watch and watch, four hours on deck and four below. And it comes hard, and all our tempers are strung until we can make the change. Did it happen that you heard Caruso and Blanche Arral this winter in New York, Mr. Pathurst?” I nodded, still marvelling over this spate of speech at table. “Well, think of hearing them, and Homer, and Witherspoon, and Amato, every night for nights and nights at the Metropolitan; and then to give it the go-by, and get to sea and shake down to watch and watch.” “You don’t like the sea?” I queried. He sighed. “I don’t know. But of course the sea is all I know—” “Except music,” I threw in. “Yes, but the sea and all the long-voyaging has cheated me out of most of the music I oughta have had coming to me.” “I suppose you’ve heard Schumann Heink?”