'And a very good-looking young man too. Now you have taken a serious notion, and are going about so much with Mr Osborne, I shouldn't be a bit surprised if you went off to church with him to St Paul's next Sunday. There, you may go down now. That's the bell. You are a regular fright, but you're the best I can make of you.' CHAPTER X. AN IDLE DAY. All at the breakfast-table remarked Miss Gordon's pallor. Osborne was shocked by it. Mrs Barclay exclaimed, 'What is the matter with you, Miss Gordon? You look as if you had had no sleep.' 'I have had no sleep,' she said gravely, as she sat down. 'No sleep! What was the matter? Are you not well?' 'I am quite well, thank you. I did not feel sleepy. I couldn't sleep. That is all.' 'Bless my soul!' cried Nevill. 'Miss Gordon, what an extraordinary thing to find a great traveller like you cannot sleep! I can scarcely believe it. I thought travellers were commanders-in-chief of sleep. I have never yet been beaten by sleep. I've slept in every conceivable place, and in every conceivable circumstances you could think of. Attitude is nothing to me. You hear of people composing themselves to sleep. I never do anything of the kind. I think I should like to sleep, and before I have taken the unnecessary precaution of closing my eyes, I've got a nightmare. I have slept in the tops of a ship. I have slept soaking in six inches of brine in a salt-mine. I have slept on the prairie, and in the tender of a railway engine. I have slept in a museum with one of the Pharaohs. I've had a good eight hours on the demonstration-table of a dissecting-room with an intact subject. I've slept in wigwams, and I've slept in the nobbiest beds they make up in 'Frisco. I've slept in the stokehole of a steamboat, and up to my neck in the crevasse of a glacier. I can doze while I'm diving under water, or while I am riding a steeplechase. Bless my soul, to think a great traveller like you could not sleep!' She looked him full in the face as she said,--'I am not travelling now. Perhaps that may account for my sleeplessness.' 'Not travelling! Well, if you split hairs you may say you are not at the moment travelling. You are not at the moment in motion. But you are to all intents and purposes travelling.' 'But suppose I do not at this moment consider myself a traveller. Suppose, although I have gone about a good deal in the past, I have formed no resolution of continuing to move about, would you, Mr Nevill, still consider me entitled to all the privileges of a traveller to sleep?' 'The case does not apply. You have not given up the road. Have you?' 'That is an indirect answer.' Then for one brief instant she glanced at Osborne, and looked back at Nevill again. 'Ah, who can tell what any of us shall not do some day?' 'What do you intend to do to-day, Miss Gordon?' asked Mrs Barclay from the head of the table.