However, before Erica could ask what he meant by that, they had come alongside the _Sea Gull_, and she forgot everything else in the thrill of climbing aboard. [Illustration: “BELAY THERE, YOUNG WOMAN, AND LET US BOTH GET OUR BREATH BACK”] “To think I was right here fifteen years ago, and can’t remember it,” she said, wistfully, when she stood on the spick-and-span deck, looking about her with eager eyes. “To think I actually sailed all the way from China in her!” Several of the crew were on deck, grinning in respectful curiosity at the captain’s daughter, and Erica, her hand proudly through her father’s arm, smiled back at them in her friendliest fashion. At the head of the companion stairs leading down to the saloon she stopped a moment, wrinkling her nose inquiringly. “Father—do all tea ships smell of Chinese incense?” she asked. “Smell it, Lis! It’s as strong as if the _Sea Gull_ had a hold full of joss sticks instead of tea.” “Oh, don’t stand there blocking the gangway, Rick,” Lis said, good-naturedly. “Go on down.” There was no doubt that the smell of incense grew stronger as they hurried down the steps. But before she reached the bottom the girl stopped short once more, staring about her with eyes whose pupils seemed to dilate visibly in the dimness. Swiftly she stooped and felt the step on which she stood. It _was_. Incredible, unheard-of on even the most luxurious clipper, the companion stairs were covered with a carpet of such long and velvety pile that the feet sank into its silken depths as softly as if they had been treading on the ancient Iceland moss that grows on the Nantucket commons. And in the half-light, the warmth and brilliance of the carpet’s coloring glowed like sunset shining through old, stained-glass windows in church. Erica’s startled gaze went to her father’s amused face, and then was instinctively drawn higher still, to the source of the dim half-light that illuminated the companionway. She saw that this came from a lantern hanging on a heavy, dull-green cord from some unseen hook above—a Chinese lantern of translucent, figured silk that repeated the old, stained-glass coloring of the carpet underfoot, and cast strange, swaying shadows on the stairs, and on her father’s and Lister’s faces, as it moved a little, regularly, back and forth with the almost imperceptible motion of the ship lifting to some incoming swell. Slowly Erica straightened up, and—her eyes still on the lantern overhead—took an impetuous step backward. Either she had completely forgotten the fact that she was on a stairway, or she turned her ankle slightly, just enough to throw her off her balance. Both Captain Eric and Lis reached for her with exclamations of warning at the same moment, and both missed her by an infinitesimal fraction of an inch.