Their Little Manouvre
Their Little ManouvreA LOVE-STORY.
By Evelyn Everett-Green.
The Auguste-Victoria was steaming with dignified deliberation into the harbour of Gibraltar. The exquisite lights of a clear February morning were shining over land and sea; and Dulcie, at her port-hole window, was gazing with eager eyes over the smooth, shining ripples of the sea, and longing for a run on deck and a good look about her.
But Dulcie's cabin-companion, a frail invalid, who had been wintering in Madeira, and was on her way to the Riviera, where the spring months were to be spent, was still lying prostrate and wan in her berth. She had suffered severely during the thirty hours' passage from Funchal to Gibraltar; and Dulcie would not leave her till she had had some breakfast and had been made comfortable for a quiet sleep.
She crossed the cabin and bent over her.
"We are in now, Aunt Mary. There, do you hear? That is the rattle of the anchor chain going down. I have sent for your tea and toast. They will be here directly. Let me make you comfortable; and after you have had something to eat you will get off to sleep, and wake up quite brisk. We have no more Atlantic to face now. Only the blue, blue Mediterranean. Oh, it does look so calm and beautiful!"
Dulcie fairly danced about the floor as she waited on the invalid. This cabin was in itself a luxury—not just a gangway, with berths on one side and lounge on the other; but a small room with space to walk about, and a fixed wardrobe in which to hang clothes—as different as possible from the accommodation on the mail-boat which had taken them from Southampton to Madeira in October. This was a great pleasure steamer, which had left New York ten days or so ago, touched at Madeira, and was bound on a cruise through the Mediterranean to the Orient.
Dulcie had come out with a party of rich relations, mainly to take charge of Miss Martin, the semi-invalid "Aunt Mary." The Meredith party had wearied of Madeira by this time, and Miss Martin unspeakably dreaded the return journey in the mail, with the horrors of the Bay of Biscay and the perils of Ushant to face. They had eagerly availed themselves of the chance of returning by this splendid German-American pleasure steamer; and Dulcie's heart was all in a flutter at the prospect of what she was to see. To-day Gibraltar, to-morrow Malaga; and thence a trip up to Granada, the place, of all others in the world, that she longed to see! Then Algiers, then Genoa; and so to the Riviera, whence she was to be sent home; as, when once in Europe, and with no more sea voyage to face, her company could be dispensed with. But what a lot of the world she would have seen by that time! Certainly there were compensations sometimes in being a poor relation whose services could always be commanded.