The Amstel had lost so much time in the rough weather of her first days out that she could not make it up with her old-fashioned single screw. She was at best a ten-day boat, counting from Sandy Hook to Boulogne, and she had not been four days out when she promised to break her record for slowness. Three days later Miss Rasmith said to Breckon, as he took the chair which her mother agilely abandoned to him beside her: “The head steward says it will be a twelve-day trip, end our bedroom steward thinks more. What is the consensus of opinion in the smoking-room? Where are you going, mother? Are you planning to leave Mr. Breckon and me alone again? It isn’t necessary. We couldn’t get away from each other if we tried, and all we ask—Well, I suppose age must be indulged in its little fancies,” she called after Mrs. Rasmith.
Breckon took up the question she had asked him. “The odds are so heavily in favor of a fifteen-days’ run that there are no takers.”
“Now you are joking again,” she said. “I thought a sea-voyage might make you serious.”
“It has been tried before. Besides, it’s you that I want to be serious.”
“What about? Besides, I doubt it.”
“About Boyne.”
“Oh! I thought you were going to say some one else.”
“No, I think that is very well settled.”
“You’ll never persuade my mother,” said Miss Rasmith, with a low, comfortable laugh.
“But if you are satisfied—”