It was two years later. Captain Fordyce and his wife were in London, walking leisurely in the vicinity of Buckingham Palace.

There was a drawing-room going on, and they gazed curiously at the long line of carriages drawn up outside the palace; and not only at them, but oftentimes into them.

The carriage occupants took their scrutiny as a matter of course. “’Steban,” said his wife, trying to draw him away from what she feared was a too noticeably disapproving survey of the thin shoulders of an emaciated dowager, “what can be going on in this carriage? There is quite a crowd about it.”

Looking over the heads of some small urchins in the gutter, they saw two very pretty girls, who were disposing of sandwiches in an exceedingly well-bred manner.

“Slaves to fashion!” remarked Captain Fordyce. “How would you like to be in there, Nina?”“To sit in a stiff dress and hold a bouquet is not my idea of happiness,” she said, smilingly; “yet if I were as lovely as those girls—”

“They have not a tithe of your good looks,” he said, with a genuine masculine depreciation of the thing that did not belong to him. Then, turning his back on the fascinating demoiselles, he stifled a yawn, and, consulting his watch, asked whether she did not wish to go back to their hotel.

“Yes, if you like,” she said, amiably, pausing to cast a glance into a near-by carriage. Within it, seated beside an officer in a military uniform, was a lady magnificent in ostrich plumes and a gleaming white satin, the train of which was heaped up in billowy white waves on the seat in front of her.

Nina uttered a delighted shriek, and the next instant her head disappeared through the open carriage window, and she was embracing her old friend, Lena Marsden.

“You little barbarian!” exclaimed the latter, kissing her affectionately, and then pushing her back in order to look at her face. “Where have you been these ages past? I have not had a line from you for six months.”

“Ask my copper-hearted captain,” she said, as her husband, in utter mystification, stepped up behind her; “he has the cruelty to drag me all about the world with him.”

“Don’t believe her, Mrs. Eversleigh,” said Captain Fordyce, lifting his hat and shaking hands with her; “she made me give up the Merrimac because on a steamer it is not always practicable for a man to have his family with him.”

“And you have left that fine old ship,” said Captain Eversleigh, “where we—” An eloquent glance at his wife completed the sentence.

Captain Fordyce smiled. “Yes, but I have now one of the finest sailing ships afloat,—the Nina.”

“And where are you?” inquired Mrs. Eversleigh.

“At Southampton,” replied Nina; “we are just from Japan.”

Mrs. Eversleigh critically surveyed her: a sedate and quiet happiness enveloped the girl; she also looked older and slightly matronly. Yet she had not lost the mischievous gleam from her eye. The old merry, vivacious spirit was visible, subdued but still intact. “You appear foreign,” said Mrs. Eversleigh, at last.

“I ought to,” observed Nina. “I bought this dress in South America last winter, my hat is from the South Sea Islands, my jacket from Japan, and so on.”“And do you always go with your husband?” Nina’s eyes went to him, and, seeing that he was deep in conversation with Captain Eversleigh, she said, earnestly: “Always,—I should be utterly miserable away from him, and he would be utterly miserable away from the sea. So we manage to keep together. He has everything so comfortable for me. I have a little cabin boudoir, the dearest nest of a place, with curtains of blue satin and a carpet that one’s feet sink into, and busts of all my favourite authors, and a cast of the Milo Venus behind—not a red drapery like the one in the Louvre, but a blue velvet one to match the room, and—”

“Why, I must come and see all this,” said Mrs. Eversleigh, in an interested way.

“Do come,” said Captain Fordyce, turning to her; “we are only seventy-five miles from London, you know. You can take a run down some morning, and return in the evening if you wish.”

“Yes, let us go,” said Captain Eversleigh, glancing at his wife’s pale face, “a breath of the salt air will do you good,” and he proceeded to make arrangements with Captain Fordyce.

“And where are you going next?” said Mrs. Eversleigh to Nina.“To Spain for a cargo of wine and fruit.”

“Don’t you get tired of these long voyages? What do you do to amuse yourself?”

“She runs up and down the ship with her baby on her back,” said Captain Fordyce, turning around.

Nina was disturbed. This was an undignified thing to tell the very grand lady before them. “I only do that occasionally,” she said, stiffly; and, darting a rebuking glance at him, “I have a great many other occupations. I read, and sew, and paint, and practise several hours a day. I have a piano and an organ, too.” The old-time child-like naÏvetÉ was delightfully revealed in her manner and speech at this moment.

“And she shoots at things hung up in the rigging,” went on her husband, who seemed bent on teasing her, “and talks nonsense to me, and writes letters to the dear five hundred friends she makes in every port we touch.”

Nina’s displeasure had passed away. “And sometimes there are useful things to do,” she said, seriously. “Sometimes sailors get ill,—do you know anything about life on sailing ships, dear Lena Eversleigh?”

“Nothing, whatever.”

Nina shuddered. “There is a great deal of cruelty in the world. ’Steban tells me of it, and we help a little. I assure you I am quite a changed character from former days.”

“Indeed!” said Mrs. Eversleigh, with polite incredulity. She was inwardly wondering how her young friend had been able to retain so much of girlish freshness, sweetness, and caprice.

“I am far more serious,” continued Nina, soberly, still bent on revealing the depths which time actually had added to her nature; “you would like me far better now. I don’t see how you could have stood me two years ago.”

“You were slightly impossible,” said Mrs. Eversleigh, suppressing her amusement.

“I used to dislike English people, and I just loved to talk nonsense; and I didn’t mean all I said; and though I knew more than people thought I knew, I had no conception of the realities of life, and—”

“In short, you were quite a depraved character,” remarked her old friend.

Nina stopped short. They were all laughing at her, and she good-naturedly joined in their amusement.

“Your life sounds a pleasant one,” said Mrs. Eversleigh, after a time, and with a faint sigh. “You don’t have that monster fashionable life always biting and worrying at your heels, and urging you into all kinds of excesses.”

“Stay with us for awhile, Mrs. Eversleigh,” said Captain Fordyce; “and perhaps we will get you out of all this. I want a first mate for my ship. Your husband is a man of many parts, I think we should work well together.”

“And I should have you to talk to,” exclaimed Nina. “How charming that would be! Don’t you want to be a sailor, Captain Eversleigh?”

He glanced at his handsome uniform, laughed heartily, then said: “What are you two people looking forward to? Are you going to sail the wide ocean all the days of your lives?”

“My wife’s plan,” said Captain Fordyce, “is for us to forsake the sea in about ten or fifteen years, and settle down on shore, and devote ourselves to the education of our child, but one is certain of nothing in this life.”

“Well,” said Mrs. Eversleigh to Nina, “if you do take up your habitation upon land, let it be near us—and now tell me something about the child. What is he like?”

“He is the most perfect thing you ever saw,” cried Nina, rapturously, “a little, dark-haired boy with an exquisite head, and the sweetest hands and feet, and the disposition of a seraph.”

“And only the other morning,” said her husband, with qualifying calmness, “I saw him with a handful of your brown hair in his hand.”

“Don’t believe him, Mrs. Eversleigh,” said Nina, anxiously. “Come and see for yourself.”

“And now we must go,” said Captain Fordyce, resolutely, “or we shall miss our train. We have been in London for three days, and I am anxious to get back to the ship.”

“Good-bye, good-bye,” said Nina, reluctantly, “don’t forget next week,” and she followed him slowly across the street. In the middle of an extremely muddy crossing she stopped to look back. There was a stir along the line of carriages, the Eversleigh’s coachman touched the chestnuts with his whip, they started, went a few steps, then stopped again.

“They may be there for an hour yet,” said Captain Fordyce, looking over his shoulder, “how would you like to be with them, little wife?”

Despite her certain knowledge that this was barefaced angling for a compliment, she could not keep the softly spoken words from her lips, “I had rather be with you.”He looked at her from his station on the curbstone,—well-pleased; for nothing flatters a man so much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it.

Then giving her a hand to help her beside him, he murmured, “Will you not repeat to me those three little words that you say so often and so prettily?”

She lifted her glowing face, and, as he bent over her, she whispered against his brown cheek, “I love you!”

THE END.

L. C. Page and Company’s
Announcement of
List of New Fiction.

Philip Winwood. (60th thousand.) A Sketch of the Domestic History of an American Captain in the War of Independence, embracing events that occurred between and during the years 1763 and 1785 in New York and London. Written by his Enemy in War, Herbert Russell, Lieutenant in the Loyalist Forces. Presented anew by Robert Neilson Stephens, author of “A Gentleman Player,” “An Enemy to the King,” etc.

With six full-page illustrations by E. W. D. Hamilton.
Library 12mo, cloth decorative, 400 pages$1.50

“One of the most stirring and remarkable romances that has been published in a long while, and its episodes, incidents, and actions are as interesting and agreeable as they are vivid and dramatic.... The print, illustrations, binding, etc., are worthy of the tale, and the author and his publishers are to be congratulated on a literary work of fiction which is as wholesome as it is winsome, as fresh and artistic as it is interesting and entertaining from first to last paragraph.”—Boston Times.

Breaking the Shackles. By Frank Barrett.

Author of “A Set of Rogues.”
Library 12mo, cloth decorative, gilt top, 350 pages$1.50

“The story opens well, and maintains its excellence throughout.... The author’s triumph is the greater in the unquestionable interest and novelty which he achieves. The pictures of prison life are most vivid, and the story of the escape most thrilling.”—The Freeman’s Journal, London.

The Progress of Pauline Kessler. By Frederic Carrel.

Author of “Adventures of John Johns.”
Library 12mo, cloth decorative, gilt top, 350 pages$1.50

A novel that will be widely read and much discussed. A powerful sketch of an adventuress who has much of the Becky Sharpe in her. The story is crisply written and told with directness and insight into the ways of social and political life. The characters are strong types of the class to which they belong.