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“Oh, then it’s settled positively,” exclaimed Adele; “for if you hesitate you’re lost.”

Paul thought Adele a little witch as she danced with glee, all the time encouraging her friend. He remembered how Adele had bewitched himself also not long before, when she was in quite another mood. Paul laughed outright, but could not keep his eyes from noticing her every movement.

As to Miss Winchester, she took hold of the problem with a vim characteristic of some of the characters of her own creation; she tackled at once the ubiquitous problem known to all men on both sides of the globe as, “How to make both ends meet,” and of course solved it satisfactorily. Some few of the craft-literary, and in some degree all women of whatever persuasion, usually do. So Adele was right,—that settled it. Miss Winchester finally saw her way clear, and joined their party.

It would have been difficult to find a more congenial and vivacious group than Professor and Mrs. Cultus, Miss Winchester and Adele, with their friends the Doctor and Paul, as they met in the salon of the steamer on the eve of departure. Henri Semple, who looked forward to meeting them later on the other side, led the party of chosen friends who came to see them off, and while trying to aid the Doctor and Paul with their hand-baggage, kept dodging Mr. Hammond, one of those antipathetic, ghostly individuals who throw cold water upon such occasions. Mrs. Maxwell sent her butler with an exquisite kedge anchor in rose-buds for Adele, “in case you have no wireless telegraph when wrecked, my dear.”