Now this will strike the reader as being very warm advocacy on the part
of Mr. Tombey, who, being called in to console and bless, cursed with
such extraordinary vigour. It may even strike the discerning reader--and
all readers, or, at least, nearly all readers, are of course discerning:
far too much so, indeed--that there must have been a reason for it; and
the discerning reader will be right. Augusta's grey eyes had been too
much for Mr. Tombey, as they had been too much for Eustace Meeson before
him. His passion had sprung up and ripened in that peculiarly rapid and
vigorous fashion that passions do on board ship. A passenger steamer is
Cupid's own hot-bed, and in this way differs from a sailing-ship. On the
sailing-ship, indeed, the preliminary stages are the same. The seed roots
as strongly, and grows and flowers with equal vigour; but here comes the
melancholy part--it withers and decays with equal rapidity. The voyage is
too long. Too much is mutually revealed. The matrimonial iron cannot be
struck while it is hot, and long before the weary ninety days are over it
is once more cold and black, or at the best glows with but a feeble heat.
But on the steamship there is no time for this, as any traveller knows.
Myself--I, the historian--have, with my own eyes seen a couple meet for
the first time at Maderia, get married at the Cape, and go on as man and
wife in the same vessel to Natal. And, therefore, it came to pass that
very evening a touching, and, on the whole melancholy, little scene was
enacted near the smoke-stack of the Kangaroo.

Mr. Tombey and Miss Augusta Smithers were leaning together over the
bulwarks and watching the phosphorescent foam go flashing past. Mr.
Tombey was nervous and ill at ease; Miss Smithers very much at ease, and
reflecting that her companion's moustachios would very well become a
villain in a novel.