"I didn't sleep for quite an hour, either," he said sympathetically. "I say, isn't it funny, Louie, when you come to think of it, that till a week ago I hadn't thought of you for years?" "Oh, I wasn't lying awake thinking of you," she said bluntly. "I was of you." He put out his hand again. His approach only made her impatient. "Oh, don't!" she snapped. "Really I shall get up and go if you worry me." He was, as he would have put it, "keen": keen enough to begin to sulk. She let him sulk, and watched the sea, always of a milky bloom, and the sky, still of the hue of an infant's eyeball. After some minutes she turned to him again. "What _do_ people get paid?" she asked abruptly. "What people?" He spoke over his shoulder. "Oh, people--you know what I mean!" "We get dashed little, I know that." (He was going into the army.) "What sort of people? Servants and those?" "And those--yes." Roy expounded. "Jolly good pay, _I_ call it; lot of lazy beggars! Why, the fellow down there wanted to charge me two pounds for patching up that centre-board, that I did in about a day. I shouldn't mind getting two pounds a day!... Why?" "I want to know." "Some of your gardeners been grizzling to you?" "No." "A wonder--rotten grousing lot! They ought to have uniforms to buy, and mess-bills and clubs and things; they'd know all about it then! Two pounds for filing a piece of iron and putting a patch on a piece of wood!--I think it will hold all right," he continued naïvely; "we shall make a deuce of a lot of leeway if it doesn't. We're flat-bottomed, you see, with only bilge-keels, and that reminds me; Izzard's coming back on Wednesday; I'd a note from him this morning. But he won't be in the way, dear, if you'll only be friends----" She could not help laughing. After all, Richenda's "grousing" was a little spoiling her fun. She turned to him again. "I haven't seen her yet," she said. "Let's go down to her now." He chuckled mildly. "You do play the dickens with the Rules, Louie." "Bother the Rules!" "Well, you don't want to go just this minute; it's jolly here----" This time she did not withdraw her hand. But he was very slow, she thought, in kissing her. He had never kissed her yet. What was the good of being caught at--nothing? Well, statues (she reflected), especially young ones, are slow---- Even as she was thinking it he did that very thing. Perhaps it was to summon up resolution to do so that he had lain awake the previous night. He kissed her cheek. The result was curious. It was the law of her physique that most moments of perturbation only turned her paler; but at this particular form of perturbation she turned suddenly pink. In a few moments she was as before. The first sign that she was Louie again was that she forbade him to repeat the offence. He sulked again. "All right," he said resentfully; "then we may as well go and see the yacht." "I don't want to see the yacht." "Well, you needn't be stuffy about it----"