"I don't think, though, it is so strange," she confided to me one lovely moonlight night when we were walking the promenade deck side by side; "it is not an unreasonable thing that we should have taken the same boat, considering that they only run once a fortnight."
"It is certainly not unreasonable," I answered, with a look into her eyes. "It is the most reasonable chance that I have ever come across in the whole of my life!"
"Why?" she answered, with a look of mischief in her dark blue eyes.
"Because," I answered fervently, with a little tremor in my voice, "it has given me the chance of spending three weeks near you!
"Let us go and look at the flying fish," she answered hastily, to change the conversation. "I do so love to see them."
Yes, I was daily becoming more and more attached to her; for the first time in my long career of flirtation I was beginning to find out what love really meant.
I was falling in love with a little divinity twelve years my junior, and from the depths of my knowledge I expected she would very justly make a fool of me—not intentionally, perhaps, but in effect the same—and laugh at me for my pains.
It seemed very bitter to think of as I saw her walking—and laughing and talking too—with St. Nivel who was six years my junior. It seemed to me, in my growing jealousy, an ideal match for her.
I forgot that young ladies never fall in love with the persons they are expected to, but invariably go off on an unknown tangent of their own, in obedience to the same law of Nature, perhaps, which causes an unusually tall girl to lose her heart to a very diminutive—though generally very consequential—little man.
In the contemplation of the varied charms of Dolores d'Alta, I almost forgot my precious casket, confided in fear and trembling to the care of the captain, and locked up by him in the ship's strong room in my presence and in the presence of St. Nivel.