table. I'll get Carew to introduce us, and perhaps they will let us
go ashore with them."

"But are they going?" she asked irresolutely.

"Surely. We have three hours here. I know Carew's mother well; she
and Mrs. Scott were schoolmates at Madame Prather's in London."

She looked up with sudden interest.

"Madame Prather's? That is where I have been, for the past five
years."

"Then we are all right," Weldon said coolly. "The arrangement is
made. Carew is the only missing link. Excuse me, and I will go in
search of him."

It was high noon when the Dunottar Castle finally weighed anchor at
Funchal and started on her long, unbroken voyage to the southward.
Side by side in the stern, Weldon and Ethel looked back at the blue
harbor dotted with the myriad little boats, at the quaint town
backed with its amphitheatre of sunlit hills and, poised on the
summit, the church where Nossa Senhora do Monte keeps watch and ward
over the town beneath. Ethel's experience was the broader for her
hilarious ride in a bullock-drawn palanquin. Weldon's experience was
more instructive. It taught him that, her hat awry and her yellow
hair loosened about her laughing face, Ethel Dent was tenfold more
attractive than when she made her usual decorous entrance to the
dining-room.