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"The coquette is indeed one degree towards the jilt; but the heart of the former is bent upon admiring herself, and giving false hopes to her lovers." --STEELE.

"I THINK the cloth has a leaning towards whist," said Mr. Cavendish, authoritatively. "My brother--I believe I have mentioned him to you before, Mr. Lydiat--was very fond of a double-dummy game--he wasn't a bishop then, by the bye--and one of the best players I ever knew was a prebendary of Westminster."

It was to the Rev. Mr. Lydiat that this remark was addressed, following an allusion from Captain Chuck to the good cards Father O'Donnell invariably seemed to hold.

"Faith!" the priest had replied, "they tell me, 'Lucky with carruds, unlucky with a wife!' Now, as I'm debarrud from trying me luck with the one, 'tis but fair I should have the benefit of the doubt, and get it the one way at laste. Now isn't that the truth, Miss Sara Cavendish?"

Sara considered a smile of acquiescence answer sufficient to Father O'Donnell's query. She was conveniently placed for the position of umpire, being seated to the right of Captain Chuck and next to the communicative father. The last board-ship dinner was over. The chief steward, like a dame on breaking-up day, had unearthed dainties from the depths of his lazarette that gave an air of Sunday festivity to the dessert--notably the ginger, stringy and lacksyrupy, and a pyramid of shrivelled apples, sacred hitherto to Sabbath indulgences.

The mild Australian spring air was circling round the saloon. Table and passengers reflected the mellow light of the last yellow sunbeams. At the same hour on the morrow what a revolution would have been brought about in the lives of each! It was natural that they should linger a little longer at the table than of custom. For reasons, too, apart from the sumptuousness of the dessert, though Sara smiled as she noted the abstracted air with which Mrs. M'Bride drew into some unseen receptacle walnuts, almonds, raisins, and biscuits for the regaling, at future unseemly hours, of Terence, and Larry, and Corny, and Kate, and Mike, and Baby M'Bride.

The Rev. Mr. Lydiat did not attempt to confute Mr. Cavendish on the question of the partiality of prebendaries for whist. He was thinking of something so widely different, being seated, in fact, just opposite to Sara, who, fresh from her afternoon sleep, was looking adorably pensive in her black dress edged with a soft white frill that took a heart-shaped curve in front, just wide enough to show the exquisite hollow in the lower part of her throat. She was still carrying on the same train of thought. Were there cliques in Melbourne? How terrible if she should find herself hopelessly submerged among the second-rates! What preconceived pleasure could she possibly take in the idea of impressing such a person as her cousin George?--and to Sara the impressing of strangers was a delight of daily renewal. Hardly anybody hitherto had been quite stolid under the first surprise of her beauty. But her sphere on the Henrietta Maria was a very restricted one. Yet what a harsh fate it was that made her loth to leave even this restricted sphere, lest in that unexplored one she must enter upon to--morrow her world should be peopled with parvenus!

Her meditations, it is clear, were thoroughly practical. But, as her expression gave her the air of thinking out an unwritten poem, Mr. Lydiat could only see in her a being to be enshrined in the holiest sanctum of a man's heart. The only side of woman's nature he had studied so far was that debased side of which the better impulses are at most erratic and simply emotional. What other study, in point of fact, had his drink-sodden parishioners in the east of London afforded him? It was natural now that he should err simply from want of experience in what may be called the conventional-young-lady side of woman's nature. It was natural that, having known for eight years violent extremes of perversity, he should imagine in so opposite a type a corresponding extreme of purity. Sara was absorbed for many instants of every day in the contemplation of subjects certainly not criminal, and no less certainly very far from elevated--following the Rev. Mr. Lydiat's conception of elevation. She had a fancy for imagining becoming dresses. She would build up a delightful wardrobe in the air, entering into as many details of her airy outfit as though it could be instantly materialised. And she liked to imagine a becoming background for her own beautiful person, in which a husband with the essentials of good birth and unlimited money, and the desirable qualifications of an air of distinction and great devotion to her, filled a reasonable space. In his walks up and down the main deck Mr. Lydiat had often seen her lost in day-dreams, such as it would have seemed to him almost sacrilegious to disturb; though it is probable that the only notion he would have been guilty of upsetting had reference to the shape of an imaginary velvet train. Still, with women as with creeds, it matters little what particular kind we profess, provided we invest them with the attributes that make them answer our needs. It is true that if a shorthand writer had taken down for Mr. Lydiat's edification every word uttered by Sara in the course of a day, he would have found it hard to extract therefrom a single sentence that he might have treasured away. Yet, if it pleased him to ascribe to her silence a sweet and modest comprehension, and to perceive in her lowly uttered replies a virginal reticence of sublime ideas, the delusion, at least, was a pleasing one. And when--for the old promptings were stronger than ever to-night--when he should have fought down his love into its proper state of subjection to his duty, how it would help him through his work to think of Sara's eyes! Was ever so ingenious a self-deceiver? For if he was now content to worship woman's purity in the abstract for the remainder of his days, why did he pass so entirely by Margaret--unobtrusive Margaret, reading with heated cheeks, under the awning, to her mother of an afternoon? Not so suggestive, certainly, of a travelled Saint Cecilia as Sara, but so full of thought for others that day-dreams bearing upon vandyked flounces could find no room in her busy brain. And why did he neglect to bestow a part of his immaterial adoration upon Nora M'Bride--an untidy, whole-hearted little maiden of fifteen, with skirts pulled out of shape by the chronic dragging they underwent from younger brothers and sisters in the juvenile clawing stage--with hair "crépe" into tangled frowsiness by a long succession of Baby M'Brides, and nose that never rested sufficiently from the attacks of baby finger nails to allow itself to assert its pretty pertness--with mouth always opening into a laugh at the eccentricities of the latest and most adored baby of all--and the sweetest voice in a lullaby that tired ears might wish to hear? Why did he long so restlessly, on this last night of all, for just the smallest sign of personal interest from Sara--a look only--provided he might recall it to the end of his life, and say, "She read me aright"? He would have been ashamed this evening, even in his own eyes, to attempt so transparent a fraud as the study of the Organum. Hitherto it had been his custom to leave the table earlier than the rest--knowing beforehand the succession in which Captain Chuck would tell the same stories, and Mr. Cavendish would make mention of his brother the bishop, and Father O'Donnell would contradict Mr. M'Bride on the subject of the true nature of Irish grievances. To-night he could not go away. Moreover, what faith was he to place in the reality of his victory over self if he must shun Sara's presence lest he should be betrayed by the strength of the feeling against which he believed himself to have struggled so successfully?

I am inclined to think, however, that Sara's astuteness in such matters was greater than even Margaret had inferred, and that the Rev. Mr. Lydiat would have learnt with surprise that he had betrayed himself at least a hundred times already. If nothing short of a declaration in a few set words could apprise a woman that she was foremost in any one man's heart--

"Love--the secret sympathy. The silver link, the silken tie"--

would be much too prosaic a theme for poets and novelists to descant upon through centuries innumerable.

"Madam, will you have me?" "You surprise me greatly, sir." "Yes--or no," and all would be said. It is the mysterious beginning, the tracing of the mutual sensation, with reference to which Shakespeare has bidden us "Let every eye negotiate for itself" that fills the poem and the romance. Not many women are really taken by surprise when the proposal comes at last. It is the inevitable crisis in a series of symptoms they have been studying and experiencing for more or less time, according to the bold or timorous disposition of their lovers. Of course, I am referring to unhampered love, of the which either board-ship love or pastoral love are very fair examples, the sea, indeed, having even more potency than has been ascribed to bucolic influences in leading the mind to defy worldly trammels, which may account for the unconsidered marriages a long voyage has so often been known to bring about.

I wonder whether such a voyage as those old explorers were wont to make, setting out with no surer goal than the westerly sun before them, might have been long enough to diminish to Sara's view the magnitude of the terrestrial objects she prized so much; whether, after two years' sailing through strange seas, thick as soup in parts with weeds, reflecting in others unsubstantial pomps and glories, she might have imagined before the end of her journey that there was something within her reach better worth living for than the dresses she was to wear at the end of it, the position she was to assure herself by her marriage, the dread of being hedged in by parvenus. No such imaginings had arisen as yet, perhaps because the voyage by the Henrietta Maria was hardly a four months' affair at its best, perhaps because it was not the time but the imagination that Sara lacked. Such imaginings at least would have failed of their effect with Melbourne so close that the Queenscliff lights were already clearly discernible in the distance. Margaret pointed them out to her sister as the two girls ran up the zinc-lined steps that led from the saloon to the main-deck overhead.

"Yes," assented Sara, wondering whether the dim lights in the distance could represent the Queenscliff that had been described to her as the resort of "the wealth and fashion of Melbourne;" "the humdrum life is all but over, and now for a worse one, I'm afraid. Do you know, Maggie--tedious as it was--I'd almost pledge myself to go straight back again in the Henrietta Maria, if I could only escape that hateful family meeting to--morrow."

"Why?" said Margaret, surprised.

"Because it's all so incongruous--can't you see? What's Uncle Piper to us? If he'd had the grace to die and leave us his money, I could understand it. But to send for us twelve thousand miles, and expect us to be in a constant state of effusiveness--I can't tell you how I hate it. I'm sure papa abominates it! And an old butcher, too! Maggie, I never seem to have realised the full horror of it as I do now--when it's too late." A pause. "Do you think I'll have to kiss them?"

"I wonder whether you care for mamma at all, Sara," was Maggie's irrelevant answer, made in a somewhat constrained voice.

"That's right," said Sara, with the air of a person who has been unjustifiably attacked, "take it the wrong way, as usual!"

"You weren't asleep, were you," pursued Margaret, thoughtfully, "when mamma was telling us all about her early life in the cabin yesterday afternoon?"

"Oh! I've heard it all before. So have you," retorted Sara. "He could have gone on sending money if he was so anxious to help us--or he could"--

"I think it's a hundred times kinder," interrupted Margaret, "to promise papa an appointment out here. I wonder, if you are so proud, that you like the notion of having us all pensioners upon a person you would feel ashamed to thank."

"I wouldn't feel at all ashamed to thank him--in a letter."

"But you think it a frightful humiliation to be brought into contact with him."

"Not a humiliation, exactly; but it's a coming down--you can't deny it. And the terrible part of it is, that I don't see what's to rescue us. We won't begin life in Melbourne as the Cavendishes, but as connections of Mr. Piper."

"That's better than being his hangers-on in England, at least."

"Maggie!!!" with three notes of exclamation in her tones. "What a temper! Don't charge me with being undutiful to mamma, or I shall retaliate on behalf of papa. It's cold. I suppose you want that woollen thing of yours, don't you?"

"Here, take it; I'll get another," said Margaret, subsiding into her accustomed position the moment anything tangible was to be sacrificed to Sara. It was only a principle, or a point involving her affections, that Maggie would not sacrifice. She threw her wrap around her sister's shoulder, who, bending her stately head that overtopped Margaret's by at least a couple of inches, expressed her thanks by rubbing her cheeks caressingly against the hands that were swathing her. Margaret was more than repaid. She ran with a light-hearted sensation below to find herself another covering. On returning a few minutes later with one of those mazes of white and scarlet wool known as "clouds" to the initiated, she found Sara had gone. Maggie looked anxiously round, and scanning the deck by the uncertain light of the stars, descried her sister's figure, with its back towards her, standing against the opposite bulwark, and facing the Victorian coast.

"Still deploring Uncle Piper's connection, I'll be bound," thought Maggie. "Poor Sara! If any one has a right to be fastidious, it is she. I wasn't half consoling enough."

She was advancing primed with words of sympathy and reassurance, when suddenly she stopped short. Sara was not alone. Standing close by her side in the shade Margaret recognised the outline of a man--tall, square, breathing even in the half-unreal illumination on deck a something of earnestness and intensity of purpose. Sara's head was slightly inclined towards it, but her statuesque outline was immovable.

Was it pain that Margaret felt? She would never have admitted that it was pain. And can that be called so that we do not recognise as such? Besides, had she not foreseen this from the days when the vessel lay becalmed in the doldrums, and she had noted the Rev. Mr. Lydiat's expression, transfigured, as it were, at the close of his address to the children? Yes; she had known it from the beginning! Just as we often know, when there is sickness in the house, that Death is waiting at the bed-head; yet start, as though he had taken us unawares, when the moribund gives up his being. There was only one fear. Would Sara feel that her lot was above all others a favoured one? True, Margaret had allowed she should have dwelt in palaces; yet even in the "divinity" that "doth hedge a king" there did not seem to be the power of inspiring such joy as in the divinity that surrounds a being wholly worthy of belief. Margaret, it must be opined, reasoned according to her nature, essentially woman-like in its proneness to worship She had long ago passed through the early stage of hero-making, having often smiled since at the ineligible qualifications of her heroes; but she never relinquished her fundamental and romantic principle that there can be no blessing equal to the finding of an anchorage for the affections in a heart worthy of entire and unreserved confidence. Would she, then, have grudged Sara this first of blessings, when from the time of receiving her within her childish arms a blessing of any sort would have had no meaning for her that could not be transferred to her sister? Anything but that! Yet how overcome an uncontrollable misgiving that a blessing of this nature had not the same value in Sara's eyes as in her own? Her step lacked the buoyancy of tread it had possessed erewhile, as she descended the saloon--steps for the second time. The irradiation of the phosphorus seemed to have been transformed into a very feeble glimmer, and she went quietly below to her cabin, where, more than half-an-hour later, Sara found her, busying herself in packing those overlooked odds and ends that seem to accumulate at sea almost as marvellously as they accumulate on shore. She was finding available corners in portmanteaus, and fitting books into vacant spaces with extraordinary nicety; her eyes shining, her cheeks--not burning, as of custom--but almost white. The unusual pallor was so becoming to Margaret that she might fearlessly have walked abroad with Sara, not as foil now, nor as owing every stray glance that rested upon her entirely to the reflected lustre of her sister's beauty.

Sara did not fail to notice the change.

"Why, Maggie, how long have you been here? I've been looking for you everywhere. You look like your own ghost. Has anything happened?"

"Nothing, dear," said Margaret, turning her back as she knelt before the open trunk. "But, oh! Sara, do tell me dear--are you happy?"

There was something in the tremulous utterance, in the almost vehement manner, as coming from quiet, collected Margaret, that made Sara look at her with astonishment.

"Because," continued Margaret, confused, "I think--I don't know--isn't it that, Sara?"

Being still on her knees, though she had turned round as she said the last words, the anxious expression in her eyes as she looked up at her sister for a response gave her the air of a pale petitioner waiting for a reprieve.

"You're too wise, Maggie," replied Sara, laughing. "Do you want to hear all--all about it?"

"Please," said Margaret resolutely--"all."

"In the first place, then," said Sara, taking a pillow from Margaret's berth and patting it into a seat for herself on the floor, "I must pay you a compliment upon your discrimination. Oh, don't be modest! You read faces wonderfully--I always said so."

"Some, perhaps," said Margaret, rather sadly; "but this was reading an expression more than a face. Any one might do that."

"And what did the expression tell you?" asked Sara, her eyes animated with feminine triumph--an excusable triumph, because so natural. The craving for power in some form or another is almost an instinct, and the sense of its possession that must needs follow such an avowal as Sara had just heard on deck might well fill her eyes with triumphant light.

"Well, what did it tell you?" she repeated. "Say what you think--do, Maggie--and then perhaps I'll tell you the truth."

"It told me," said Maggie, with effort, "that you had filled up a good man's heart and soul--yes, you may smile, Sara, at my way of expressing it--but that is what I mean. The expression you want me to interpret does not take a bit from that other expression. It is goodness, nothing else--not Sunday-school goodness, but the sort of goodness that must come from having a strong mind, and bending it all to the carrying out of one's idea of what is noble."

"What a flow of eloquence, Maggie! And you used to sit like a mouse in the corner, at Madame Thonon's debating society--do you remember? But, ápropos of the strong mind. If it was all full of the noble purpose, where was the space for poor me?"

"I think he had idealised you, Sara! I don't mean to say anything uncomplimentary, dear--you know that I consider you worthy of a throne!--but I think he blended this ideal conception somehow with his other high aims; and--well--I don't think he was in love with you in an ordinary way."

"I've never admitted that he was 'in love' with me at all yet," said Sara. "You must know, Maggie, all this happened quite by chance to-night. I was looking over the side of the ship at the lighthouse, you know, thinking of those hateful Pipers, and wondering whether we'd be at their mercy by this time to-morrow night, when a voice--I knew whose it was directly, though it sounded rather muffled--said, close to my side, 'You are taking leave of the phosphorus, Miss Sara?' I wasn't thinking of the phosphorus in the least, as it happened. 'I wish all leave-taking came as easily,' I said, never dreaming that I was going to explode a mine. But, Maggie, you should have heard the change in his voice! It almost terrified me! 'Do you mean it?' he cried. The way in which he said it sounded almost fierce, if you can understand. And before poor I could say a word, or do anything but simply stare at him in astonishment"--a smile from Margaret, who knew of old the witchery of glance implied by Sara's "stare"--"a torrent of words came out--I can't remember half of them--but really I almost felt as if we were acting a play. I wish I had them written down!"

"Give me the meaning of them, if you can, will you, Sara?" said Margaret gently.

"Oh, you know the meaning, Maggie, well enough. I think he began by saying that he had determined to keep his secret to himself--a fine secret when even you guessed it--and that to have met a 'perfect type of womanhood'--I remember those words, because no one ever called me that before--should be encouragement, or support, or something of the sort enough all one's life. You see he mixed up his faith with it in a way that bewildered me. But now, he said, the faint hope my words had given him--I am sure there wasn't any meaning of the kind in them, but I didn't like to disappoint him by saying so--the faint hope my words had given him broke down all 'prudential considerations.' Isn't that well remembered? And, at least, he would tell me that henceforth--by which he gave me to understand that he meant to the very end of his days--he would cherish, next to his religion of course, his recollection of me, or my image, at any rate. I really can't remember how he said this part of it. It's the funniest sort of love-making, if you come to think of it, for the upshot of it seemed to be that if at any time of my life I had a sort of penchant for him, he'd come from the other world to marry me. And in the meantime I'm his 'lady,' and he's my knight, or, rather, he's like one of those good-natured people you can always fall back upon at a party if somebody you don't like asks you to dance; in fact, if one were frightfully unlucky in all one's offers he'd always be there as a pis-aller."

A pis-aller! When poor Margaret would have cut off her feet or walked upon knives, like the little mermaid in Andersen's tales, if thereby she could have testified to her longing to serve him.

"And you didn't say you cared for him, Sara!"

"Why should I?" said Sara, open-eyed. "He's very well! I like him in a way, but you wouldn't have me live like that dissenting minister's wife at Highbury, with darned chairs and no table-cloths. We're going out to 'better ourselves,' aren't we! I'm sure I don't know what else we're going for!"

"But there are such different ways of bettering oneself," pleaded Margaret, as if she were wooing her sister by proxy. "What would it be to you to wait for a little!" Then, in a voice of which the intonation sounded broken to Sara's ears, "Tell me--I could advise better if you would tell me, dear--you don't care for him rightly, do you?"

"I don't know what you call rightly," said Sara, in offended accents. "If things were different I might have said 'Yes.'"

"Do you mean if he were rich?" asked Margaret, with an inflection of something that grated on Sara's ears.

"Yes I do mean it, if you will put it in that way. I know what I like, and how I should feel towards any one who couldn't give me a single thing I cared about. Besides, what better arrangement could I make? I haven't bound myself in any way."

"But he's bound, you say?" interrupted Margaret quickly.

"That's because he chooses to be. I don't think he's like other people in that way, I must say. He told me, Maggie," dropping her eyes, "that he could not understand caring about more than one woman in a lifetime. Well, I should say he must be thirty, at least, by this time, and as he's never cared about any one before, I don't suppose he's likely to change, even if he wanted to."

"To change! Oh, no!" said Margaret.

She turned to her trunk again, and went to her packing with a will, her fingers trembling a little as she smoothed out the top layer of all. What a world of misfits it was. How one creature might spurn what another would have treasured so rapturously! For what was it but the spurning of proffered love to speak of it as a pis-aller--a something to be held over for use if nothing better offered? And it was as fruitless to look for any responsive sentiment in Sara as to look for enthusiasm regarding the sunlight from a mole. Even the foundation for it was lacking in such a nature as hers. Margaret doubted whether Sara was capable of feeling any kind of love beyond that purely instinctive family regard common to such as do not hate their belongings. To enjoy bodily luxury and be treated with consideration, these, then, were all her desires. Still, had Margaret any right to quarrel with her sister because she did not see the Rev. Mr. Lydiat through another's eyes? Surely not; and Margaret told herself that had Sara attested her inability to love him as a reason for her coldness, she could have respected the reason without entirely comprehending it. But how could she respect the calculating, worldly reasoning advanced so transparently by Sara? Mr. Lydiat, she had admitted, was not distasteful to her. She might have been bought at a price, had he wooed her with gold in his hand. Failing which, he might lavish his heart's store of devotion upon her through a life-long stretch of years unavailingly. If Sara had seen in him the tenth part of the qualities that Margaret saw, she would have had no fear as to the future. His wife would want neither for food nor clothes, nor decent habitation, nor lack the necessaries of life. Though heaven only knows what different meanings may attach to that simple word--all arising, I sincerely believe, from our different conceptions of the universe. For Sara, with the cravings of an odalisque, it was a very solid world--capable of affording happiness only through its tangible parts. Whereas for Margaret, though she had found it, indeed, a working-day world, its material good seemed trifling compared with a good wholly independent of it. But Sara studied her sensations only.

"Margaret!" she said, after a long pause, during which Margaret had been thinking all the things I have recorded.

"Well!"

"Margaret, don't put away that tin of preserved milk. I asked the steward for some dessert biscuits on my way down; and if you'll get a plate from the saloon, we can have a feast. Don't look so cross about it! I suppose I'm not to be hungry next, because I've had an offer!"