"I feel as if I'd been a trip on the sea, or up on a mountain top. I wish we could swop B—— for him. Half a dozen of him in a Cabinet now—eh?"
"My dear fellow, don't! The contrast is too painful."
CHAPTER X
A BLACK OBJECT-LESSON
"It's a wonderful world!" said Aunt Jannet Harvey, for the four hundred and fourteenth time since, one by one, the Forelands and Dungeness and Beachy Head faded over the quarter as they ran down Channel. "And it gets more and more wonderful the further you go. Jean, my dear, have you ever in your dreams seen anything equal to that?"
"Never!" murmured Jean, wide-eyed and breathless, lest the smallest display of the ordinary functions of living should resolve into its natural elements the ethereal vision before them.
And yet it was only a tiny South Sea atoll, one of the myriad gleaming gems that deck the bosom of the great southern ocean in clusters, and strings, and ropes, and solitaires, from the Pelews to Pitcairn, of visible beauty indescribable, and in some cases possessed of natural latent treacherousness hardly second thereto.
It was still dusky twilight when they three climbed the companion, to taste the sweet of the dawn and watch the perpetual wonder of the coming day. They had learned already to rejoice in the dawnings as the purest and fullest revelations of Nature's exuberant largesse. The sunsets were gorgeous and magnificent beyond compare, but they had in them the elements of dissolution and decay, whereas the pure pearl splendours of the dawn sang full and true of new birth, new hopes, and the deep springs of life and joy.
Anxious as he was to get to his life's work, and grudging every moment and every league that lay between it and him, Blair had still felt it a duty to afford Jean every possible enjoyment of travel which the voyage could offer her. She was giving up much, she was going into outer exile for his sake; the chance might never come again. She should see all that was possible before the fringes fell behind them. And so they had come by way of Suez, and touched at Bombay and Ceylon, and then away to Australia and New Zealand, and then a great stretch round the outer skirts of the Australs and Paumotus, with only such stoppages as were absolutely necessary, and then straight for the work that awaited them.