“Well”—I pieced it together—“she’s an old friend, older than we know. It was a meeting after a long separation.” “Yes, such a lot of them as he does know!” Mrs. Nettlepoint sighed. “Such a lot of them?” “He has so many female friends—in the most varied circles.” “Well, we can close round her then,” I returned; “for I on my side know, or used to know, her young man.” “Her intended?”—she had a light of relief for this. “The very one she’s going out to. He can’t, by the way,” it occurred to me, “be very young now.” “How odd it sounds—her muddling after him!” said Mrs. Nettlepoint. I was going to reply that it wasn’t odd if you knew Mr. Porterfield, but I reflected that that perhaps only made it odder. I told my companion briefly who he was—that I had met him in the old Paris days, when I believed for a fleeting hour that I could learn to paint, when I lived with the _jeunesse des écoles_; and her comment on this was simply: “Well, he had better have come out for her!” “Perhaps so. She looked to me as she sat there as if, she might change her mind at the last moment.” “About her marriage? “About sailing. But she won’t change now.” Jasper came back, and his mother instantly challenged him. “Well, _are_ you going?” “Yes, I shall go”—he was finally at peace about it. “I’ve got my telegram.” “Oh your telegram!”—I ventured a little to jeer. “That charming girl’s your telegram.” He gave me a look, but in the dusk I couldn’t make out very well what it conveyed. Then he bent over his mother, kissing her. “My news isn’t particularly satisfactory. I’m going for _you_.” “Oh you humbug!” she replied. But she was of course delighted. II PEOPLE usually spend the first hours of a voyage in squeezing themselves into their cabins, taking their little precautions, either so excessive or so inadequate, wondering how they can pass so many days in such a hole and asking idiotic questions of the stewards, who appear in comparison rare men of the world. My own initiations were rapid, as became an old sailor, and so, it seemed, were Miss Mavis’s, for when I mounted to the deck at the end of half an hour I found her there alone, in the stern of the ship, her eyes on the dwindling continent. It dwindled very fast for so big a place. I accosted her, having had no conversation with her amid the crowd of leave-takers and the muddle of farewells before we put off; we talked a little about the boat, our fellow-passengers and our prospects, and then I said: “I think you mentioned last night a name I know—that of Mr. Porterfield.” “Oh no I didn’t!” she answered very straight while she smiled at me through her closely-drawn veil. “Then it was your mother.” “Very likely it was my mother.” And she continued to smile as if I ought to have known the difference. “I venture to allude to him because I’ve an idea I used to know him,” I went on.