his manoeuvre created within. He secured the cockerel, and drawing it
forth was about to offer it to Lydia, when in its struggles to escape
it drove one of its spurs into his hand. Dunham suddenly released it;
and then ensued a wild chase for its recapture, up and down the ship,
in which it had every advantage of the young man. At last it sprang
upon the rail; he put out his hand to seize it, when it rose with a
desperate screech, and flew far out over the sea. They watched the
suicide till it sank exhausted into a distant white-cap.

"Dat's gone," said the cook, philosophically. Dunham looked round.
Half the ship's company, alarmed by his steeple-chase over the deck,
were there, silently agrin.

Lydia did not laugh. When he asked, still with his habitual sweetness,
but entirely at random, "Shall we--ah--go below?" she did not answer
definitely, and did not go. At the same time she ceased to be so
timidly intangible and aloof in manner. She began to talk to Dunham,
instead of letting him talk to her; she asked him questions, and
listened with deference to what he said on such matters as the
probable length of the voyage and the sort of weather they were likely
to have. She did not take note of his keeping his handkerchief wound
round his hand, nor of his attempts to recur to the subject of his
mortifying adventure. When they were again quite alone, the cook's
respect having been won back through his ethnic susceptibility to
silver, she remembered that she must go to her room.

"In other words," said Staniford, after Dunham had reported the whole
case to him, "she treated your hurt vanity as if you had been her pet
schoolboy. She lured you away from yourself, and got you to talking
and thinking of other things. Lurella is deep, I tell you. What