Heriot recalled the criticism during his first day on board. Neither of the ladies was visible until Queenstown was reached, and he paced the deck, pursuing his reflections by the aid of tobacco. She would "make an admirable mother, and that was the main thing"! Of the second half of the opinion he was not so sure. To marry a woman simply because one believed she would shine in a maternal capacity was somewhat too altruistic, he thought. However, he was fully aware that Miss Pierways had other recommendations.
She appeared with her mother at the head of the companion-way while he was wishing that he hadn't come, and he found their chairs for them, and arranged their rugs, and subsequently gave their letters to the steward to be posted.
After leaving Queenstown, Mrs. Van Buren's sufferings increased, and the girl, who, saving for a brief interval, was well and cheerful, was practically in his charge. It was Heriot who accompanied her from the saloon after breakfast, and strolled up and down with her till she was tired. When the chair and the rug—the salient features of a voyage are the woman, the chair, and the rug—were satisfactorily arranged, it was he who sat beside her, talking. Flying visits she made below, while her mother kept her cabin; but for the most part she was on deck—or in the saloon, or in the reading-room—and for the most part Heriot was the person to whom she looked for conversation. If he had been a decade or two younger, he would probably have proposed to her long before they sighted Sandy Hook, and it surprised him that he did not succumb to the situation as it was. A woman is nowhere so dangerous, and nowhere is a man so susceptible, as at sea. The interminable days demand flirtation, if one is not to perish of boredom. Moonlight and water are notoriously potent, even when viewed for only half an hour; and at sea, the man and the girl look at the moonlight on the water together regularly every evening. And it is very becoming to the girl. Miss Pierways' face was always a disappointment to Heriot at breakfast. The remembrance of its factitious softness the previous night made its hardness in the sunshine look harder. He wondered if it was the remembrance of its hardness at breakfast that kept him from proposing to her when they loitered in the moonlight. He was certainly doing his best to fall in love with her, and everything conspired to assist him; but the days went on, and the momentous question remained unuttered.
"We shall soon be there," she said one evening as they strolled about the deck after dinner. "I'm beginning to be keen. Have you noticed how everybody is saying, 'New York' now? At first no one alluded to it—we mightn't have been due for a year—and since yesterday nobody's talking of anything else!"
"Nearly everyone I've spoken to seems to have made the trip half a dozen times," said Heriot. "I feel dreadfully untravelled in the smoking-room. When are you going to Niagara? Niagara is one of the things I'm determined not to miss."
"I was talking to some girls who have lived in New York all their lives—when they weren't in Europe—and they haven't been there yet. They told me they had been to the panorama in Westminster!"
"I have met a Londoner who had never been to the Temple."
"No? How perfectly appalling!" she exclaimed, none the less fervently because she hadn't been to it herself. "Oh yes, I know I shall adore Niagara! I want to see a great deal of America while I'm there."
"I wish I had time to see more; I should like to go to California."
"I wouldn't see California for any consideration upon earth!" she declared. "California, to me, is Bret Harte—I should be so afraid of being disillusioned. When we went to Ireland once, do you know, Sir George, it was a most painful shock to me! My ideas of Ireland were founded on Dion Boucicault's plays—I expected to see all the peasants in fascinating costumes, with their hair down their backs, just as one sees them on the stage. The reality was terrible. I shudder when I recall the disappointment."