Chapter One.

Dislike.

The shallow North Sea had been fretted by a northerly gale, and the voyage from Hull even more than usually unpleasant, when the passengers on board the Eldorado struggled up to see the low-lying land which forms the entrance to Stavanger. The vessel was crowded, but hardly any one had appeared at meals, and the groups on deck had been too much occupied with their own discomforts to do more than take a languid interest in each other. Now that the worst was over, this interest quickened.

Two ladies, a mother and daughter, were standing a little apart, when a gentleman strolled up to them. They greeted him with a smile.

“I have not seen you since the night you came on board; where have you been all the time?” he began.

“Don’t ask,” said the elder lady, with a shudder. “For the first time in my life I have suffered the pangs of actual remorse, because I persuaded Millie to come. However, we are never going home again, that is quite decided.”

“Unless we walk,” said Millie firmly.

“Do you mean to land at Stavanger?”

“How can you ask? I would land anywhere, even on a desert island. Besides, we have been reading somebody’s Best Tour, and according to that it is the right way of going into Norway. Once adopt a guide-book, you become its slave.”

“Then we shall be likely to jog along together, unless you object?” said Wareham, with a smile.

Millie looked at him with frank delight, her mother gave a quick glance, in which more mingled feelings might have been read. She made haste, however, to express her pleasure.

“I am not likely to object to an unexpected piece of good fortune, but I give you fair warning that, although I can get on by myself as well as most women, if there is a man at hand, I am pretty sure to turn over exacting carriole-drivers, or anybody making himself disagreeable, to him.”

“I am not alarmed. There are no exacting carriole-drivers in Norway, and you are more likely to over-pay than be over-charged. You will like the country.”

“I am going to enjoy it immensely,” said Millie, “when once I am there. This doesn’t count, does it? because, though I believe we are staring at lovely mountains, and there are rose-red sheds standing up against them, I feel too much humiliated to be enthusiastic, and my one longing is for tea. Besides, I am dreadfully cold.”

“Come to the other side of the ship,” said her mother briskly. “We shall see the town better, and be nearer our luggage.”

Wareham followed, he hardly knew why.

He liked the Ravenhills very well, but he had not intended to attach himself to any fellow-travellers, and when he spoke of jogging along together, it was rather an allusion to the inevitable gravitation of Norwegian travel than to that deliberate companionship which their words seemed to accept. He told himself, however, that this was a natural mistake, born of inexperience. It would be easy enough to break away when he found it desirable; he would not worry his holiday with excess of caution. Mrs Ravenhill was charming, and Millie might turn out to possess the same delicate quality. As she stood before him with her mother, he was struck with the prettiness of her hazel eyes and her dimples, and with that swift rush of thought into the imaginary future which we have all experienced, and from which we often return with a flush of shame, he saw himself falling in love with Millie, and coming back to England an engaged man. The thought was so vivid, that when at this moment she turned to speak to him, he had scarcely time to call himself back to the actual condition of things, and something of his mental picture was perhaps betrayed in his face, for she glanced quickly at him a second time, and coloured slightly.

“Norway may be as delightful as you all declare,” she said, “but when I set up a delightful land it shall have no custom-house. Here we shall have to wait, I suppose, while great big men amuse themselves with rummaging among all my most nicely packed corners. Oh, it’s absurd, it’s barbarous! And mother wouldn’t bring a maid.”

Mrs Ravenhill had moved a little forward, to speak to one of the stewards who were carrying up the cabin packages. When next Wareham looked at her, she had apparently relinquished her intention, and was talking to a gentleman who up to this moment had stood aloof, and who, even now, showed no great conversational alacrity, as Wareham remarked with a little amusement.

“Who is that?” he asked Miss Ravenhill.

“That?” Millie’s eyes began to smile. “Oh, poor Colonel Martyn. It is really wicked of mother, for she knows how frightened he gets when he hasn’t Mrs Martyn to protect him. But here she comes,” and Millie stopped suddenly.

Wareham did not notice the break, for his eyes had passed Mrs Martyn, and fallen with a start of annoyed surprise upon the face of a girl who followed her. The girl was young, and unusually tall, though, owing to an extraordinary grace and ease of movement, this only became evident when you compared her with the other women who stood round. She looked neither to the right nor left, and with the sun shining brightly behind her, it was difficult to see her face distinctly, but Millie, who was watching Wareham, perceived that he recognised her, and that the recognition was, for some reason or other, unwelcome.

“You know Miss Dalrymple?” she asked curiously.

Wareham’s expression had stiffened.

“No,” he said briefly.

“No? But you have seen her? You must have seen her this season?”

“Yes, I have seen her.”

Millie’s mouth opened as if she were going to put another question, but if it were so her intention changed. She said with enthusiasm—

“She is very beautiful.”

Wareham did not answer. He had turned his back upon the group, and was looking over the water past some brilliantly red-roofed barns to a broken line of tender amethyst-coloured hills.

“Are those people going to get out here?”

“What people?”

“Miss Dalrymple and her friends.”

“No. They told us at Hull—we all dined together at the Station Hotel, you know—that they should go on to Bergen.”

“Oh, good!” said Wareham, with unmistakable relief.

Millie began to laugh.

“You don’t know her, yet you have a dislike to her!”

“Yes. I dislike her.”

Something in Wareham’s tone checked further questioning. It was grave, outspoken, and the least little bit in the world haughty. Millie flew away from the subject, though her thoughts crept back to it again and again, with, it must be owned, a secret glee.

Slowly the vessel steamed into the harbour. The sun had broken out brilliantly after the gale; clouds, blown into strange shapes, struck across the sky, and glittered whitely behind a cleft in the distant mountains; the indigo blue water was full of dancing movement, and gave everything an air of gay exhilaration which it