There is my little girl and here is your husband! Good-bye!
Oh, you are going to get off here too! Will I come up to the hotel some time and see you? Indeed, I shall be delighted to! And will I bring my little girl? How happy she will be to come! You must excuse my excitement for I haven't seen her for two months, you know. There, she sees me! How well and happy she looks! Will I bring my Bible with me when I come? Yes, dear lady, most gladly will I. Here, dear, this way! Good-bye! Good-bye!
XI
Among the Clouds
The conversation had drifted by mysterious and unexplained associations of ideas from the unusual excellence of the sweets served at the end of dinner upon this line of steamers, to the most grewsome tales of adventure which the narrators themselves had experienced. Gladys, who by the most special of special permissions and the kind favour of the captain, because she was an only child, well behaved at table, and—because it was off season—had been permitted to take Sunday dinner with her parents, sat beside the captain in the gorgeous first cabin saloon with round eyes fixed upon the story-tellers.
There was present at dinner the usual shipboard mixture of society: at the captain's right, a man whose extensive business interests called him often into these waters; next, a gentleman and his wife, travelling for their united healths; third, a government official returning to India after a brief holiday; on the opposite side, two globe-trotters, an American lady from Southern India, Gladys' father, and finally Gladys herself. The chair between the little girl and her father was vacant, for Gladys' mother, who had been at dinner, feeling the slight roll of the boat, had retired early to her cabin, leaving the child to the father's care.
If her mother had been there Gladys would not have been permitted to listen to the stories which had been told and enjoy the delicious sensations of fear which she had experienced as she had heard the accounts of awful dangers and marvellous escapes. The merchant had obliged this little dinner company to spend five days with him without food on a desert island and, after a thrilling rescue, had made them watch him fall seventy feet from the masthead of a ship to become the ship-surgeon's pet patient with twenty bones to set. Gladys had felt herself wasting away with starvation as he had told of his sufferings and, when he had cheerfully reached his second story, she could hear her own bones grate as if broken asunder, as she moved her legs under the table.
Soon it came the turn of the lady from Southern India to tell a story.