"Yes, but you see we don’t mind knocking about, and wet, and spells of discomfort--she might be sick, most people are."

Mrs. Romilly was not blind to the trend of feeling.

"I don’t see why she shouldn’t have a try," she suggested mildly, "if she is ill, or hates it, she needn’t go again.  After all, poor thing, she never has been."

"Well, Mother, you see it was Sir Marmaduke’s affair before this, wasn’t it?  And such a crowd with Penberthy and Mollie--as he didn’t ask Miss Chance, we couldn’t force her in, could we?"

"Well, there won’t be a crowd now," persisted Mrs. Romilly, "even if you all go--only five."

"Only five!"  Christobel looked at Adrian over her mother’s head, she said the two words with her lips--soundlessly--and smiled.

But Adrian would not smile.

"If she’d been with us the other day, in the thunderstorm, she wouldn’t have wanted to go again," said the boy darkly, "she’d have been in fits."

"But, darling, I thought you said it was lovely?" this, from his mother in an expostulating voice.

Christobel warned, with raised eyebrows, and headshakes.

"So it was when the storm was over," said Adrian, refusing to see the signals, "but she wouldn’t have enjoyed the process of working through it.  Of course we did," he added quickly, "we enjoy anything, no matter how beastly--but when it comes to being drenched, and battered, and shaken up, Miss Chance mightn’t.  And you see, Mum, we can’t put her ashore--that’s flat.  If she comes, she must come.  I can’t undertake to land people."

"You landed Hughie one day."

"That was a dead calm."

"Well, but supposing there is a calm to-morrow?"

"If there is we shall go straight back to Salterne, that’s all--and sleep on the boat," announced Adrian desperately; "surely Miss Chance would find it pretty uncomfortable to have to sleep on the yawl with four other people, and not even a toothbrush among the lot."

The unfortunate part of this episode was that it did not achieve its object, but only succeeded in making Mrs. Romilly firmer on the contested point.  She did not believe in the discomforts Adrian had mentioned--which were perfectly true, of course--because they had been kept from her 

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