glass is too far below thirty to suit me. I think it means fog.”      

       “But it's so clear and beautiful,” she protested.     

       “It's always especially beautiful at sea before something bad happens,” he explained, smiling. “And there has been a big fog-bank off to s'uth'ard for two days. It's a good deal like life, dear. All lovely, and then the fog shuts in!”      

       “But I would be happy with you in the fog,” she assured him.     

       He glowed at her words and answered with his eyes.     

       She would have followed him back upon the bridge, but the steward intercepted her. He had waited outside the chart-room.     

       “Mr. Marston's compliments, Miss Marston! He requests you to join him at cards.”      

       She pouted as she gave back Mayo's look of annoyance, and then obeyed the mandate.     

       Mr. Marston was stroking his narrow strip of chin beard with thumb and forefinger when she arrived on the quarter-deck. The men of business were below, and he motioned to a hammock chair beside him.     

       “Alma, for the rest of this cruise I want you to stay back here with our guests where you belong,” he commanded with the directness of attack employed by Julius Marston in his dealings with those of his ménage.     

       “What do you mean, father?”      

       “That—exactly. I was explicit, was I not?”      

       “But you do not intimate that—that I have—”      

       “Well?” Mr. Marston believed in allowing others to expose their sentiments before he uncovered his own.     

       “You don't suggest that there is anything wrong in my being on the bridge where I enjoy myself so much. I am trying to learn something about navigation.”      

       “I am paying that fellow up there to attend to all that.”      

       “And it gets tiresome back here.”      

       “You selected your own company for the cruise—and there is Mr. Beveridge 

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