"Is that a threat, Steve?" he asked, not too sincerely amused, yet still taking her and her chatter with a lightness and amiable condescension entirely masculine. "A threat?" "Yes. Do you mean that when I return I shall find my little sister a handful?" "A handful? For whose hand? Jim, dear, you are old-fashioned. Girls aren’t on or in anybody’s hands any more after they’re of age. Do you think you’ll be responsible for me? Dear child, we’ll be comrades or nothing at all to each other. You really must grow up, little brother, before you come back, or I’m afraid—much as I love you—I might find you just a little bit prosy——" The call for all ashore silenced her. She stood confronting Cleland with high colour and pretty, excited grey eyes, for a moment more, then the gay defiance faded in her face and her attitude grew less resolute. "Oh, Jim!" she said under her breath, "—I adore you——" And melted into his embrace. As he held her in his arms, for a moment the instinct to repel her and disengage himself came over him swiftly. A troubled idea that her lips were very soft—that he scarcely knew this girl whose supple figure he held embraced, left him mute, confused. "Dear Jim," she whimpered, "I love you dearly. I shall miss you dreadfully. I’ll always be your own little sister Steve, and you can come back and bully me and I’ll tag after you and adore you. Oh, Jim—Jim—my own brother—my own—my _own_——!" It was a bright, sunny, windy May day. He could still distinguish her in her black gown on the crowded pier which was all a-flutter with brilliant gowns and white handkerchiefs. After the distant pier had become only a square of colour like a flower-bed, he still stood on the hurricane deck of the huge liner looking back at where he had last seen her. The fragrance of her still clung to him—seemed to have been inhaled somehow and to have subtly permeated him—something of the warm, fresh, pliant youth of her—unspoiled, utterly unawakened to anything more delicate or complex than the frank, vigorous passion of her affection. Yet, as her breathless, tearful lips had clung to his, so the perfume of the embrace clung to him still, leaving him perplexed, vaguely disturbed, yet intensely conscious of new emotion, unfamiliar in his experience with this girl who yesterday had been what she always had been to him—a growing child to be affectionately looked after and chivalrously cherished and endured. "I couldn’t be in love with Steve," he said to himself incredulously. The thought amazed and exasperated him. "I’m a fine sort of man," he thought bitterly, "if I can’t kiss Steve as innocently as she kisses me. There’s something wrong with me. I must be a sort of dog—or crazy——" He went below. Stephanie went back in the car, alone. She staunched her tears with her black-edged handkerchief until they ceased to fill the wonderful grey eyes.