man of the ship (every mail steamer has an amateur jester on board, as necessary as the sail-maker) soon learned to turn his melancholy close-shaven countenance towards her as often as he launched a joke, and never failed to meet an answering sparkle of amusement from under her long black eyelashes. Lady May always looked down her nose—no small distance, by the way—whenever this vulgar person tried to be facetious, and he hated her in return with a vulgar and vivacious hatred. Then one after another of the waifs and strays of travelling life, people who drift about from one place to another out of pure inanity, and who bore each other to death with their stories of hotels and railways, fastened themselves on Miss Lauder’s neighbourhood, delighted to find a new victim, and poured out endless moving incidents of tables d’hôte and excursion trains, of the price of tickets, the crimes of stewards, the loss of snippets of lace, or disappearances of silver ornaments from their persons, to her sympathetic and intelligent ear.
Lady May meanwhile remained serenely contemptuous of the lower depths of society, even on this little ark of existence that passed so bravely from one continent to the other. Absorbed in her own superiority, and accompanied by her silent, handsome friend, she lounged on
