"Hush, Edith," answered the younger, "it's an Englishman." And they all
three mutely recognized the right of the Englishman to stop, not only
the boat, but the whole solar system, if his ticket entitled him to a
passage on any particular planet, while Mr. Miles Arbuton of Boston,
Massachusetts, passed at his ease from one vessel to the other. He had
often been mistaken for an Englishman, and the error of those
spectators, if he had known it, would not have surprised him. Perhaps it
might have softened his judgment of them as he sat facing them at
breakfast; but he did not know it, and he thought them three very common
English people with something professional, as of public singing or
acting, about them. The young girl wore, instead of a travelling-suit, a
vivid light blue dress; and over her sky-blue eyes and fresh cheeks a
glory of corn-colored hair lay in great braids and masses. It was
magnificent, but it wanted distance; so near, it was almost harsh. Mr.
Arbuton's eyes fell from the face to the vivid blue dress, which was not
quite fresh and not quite new, and a glimmer of cold dismissal came into
them, as he gave himself entirely to the slender merits of the steamboat
breakfast.

He was himself, meantime, an object of interest to a young lady who sat
next to the English party, and who glanced at him from time to time, out
of tender gray eyes, with a furtive play of feeling upon a sensitive
face. To her he was that divine possibility which every young man is to
every young maiden; and, besides, he was invested with a halo of romance
as the gentleman with the blond mustache, whom she had seen at Niagara
the week before, on the Goat Island Bridge. To the pretty matron at her
side, he was exceedingly handsome, as a young man may frankly be to a
young matron, but not otherwise comparable to her husband, the
full-personed good-humored looking gentleman who had just added sausage