"Yes, but what?"

"Well, for one thing she was very fond of poetry. It was that which
first drew us together."

"Poetry!" Sam's heart sank a little. He had read a certain amount of
poetry at school, and once he had won a prize of three shillings and
sixpence for the last line of a limerick in a competition in a weekly
paper, but he was self-critic enough to know that poetry was not his
long suit. Still there was a library on board ship and no doubt it
would be possible to borrow the works of some standard poet and bone
them up from time to time.

"Any special poet?"

"Well, she seemed to like my stuff. You never read my sonnet-sequence
on Spring, did you?"

"No. What other poets did she like besides you?"

"Tennyson principally," said Eustace Hignett with a reminiscent quiver
in his voice. "The hours we have spent together reading the Idylls of
the King!"

"The which of what?" enquired Sam, taking a pencil from his pocket and
shooting out a cuff.

"The Idylls of the King. My good man, I know you have a soul which
would be considered inadequate by a common earthworm, but you have