“I should go if I were you, Mary.  The breeze on the river will do you a world of good, dear.”

I was nothing loath to take them at their word, so I let them go off in their four-in-hand coach, a big and bustling party, while with a fast-beating heart I made ready to spend the day with Martin, having, as I thought, so much and such serious things to say to him.

A steam launch from the ship was waiting for us at the Westminster Pier, and from the moment I stepped into it I felt like another woman.  It was a radiant day in May, when the climate of our much-maligned London is the brightest and best, and the biggest city in the world is also the most beautiful.

How I loved it that day!  The sunlight, the moving river, the soft air of early summer, the passing panorama of buildings, old and new—­what a joy it was to me I sat on a side seat, dipping my hand over the gunwale into the cool water, while Martin, with a rush of racy words, was pointing out and naming everything.

St. Paul’s was soon past, with the sun glistening off the golden cross on its dome; then London Bridge; then the Tower, with its Traitors’ Gate; then the new Thames Bridge; and then we were in the region of the barges and wharfs and warehouses, with their colliers and coasting traders, and with the scum of coal and refuse floating on the surface of the stream.

After that came uglier things still, which we did not mind, and then the great docks with the hammering of rivets and the cranking noise of the lightermen’s donkey engines, loading and unloading the big steamers and sailing ships; and then the broad reaches of the river where the great liners, looking so high as we steamed under them, lay at anchor to their rusty cable-chains, with their port-holes gleaming in the sun like rows of eyes, as Martin said, in the bodies of gigantic fish.

At last we came out in a fresh breadth of water, with marshes on either side and a far view of the sea, and there, heaving a little to the flowing tide, and with a sea-gull floating over her mizzen mast, lay Martin’s ship.

She was a wooden schooner, once a Dundee whaler called the Mary but now re-christened the Scotia, and it would be silly to say how my eyes filled at sight of her, just because she had taken Martin down into the deep Antarctic and brought him safely back again.

“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” said Martin.

“Isn’t she?” I answered, and in spite of all my troubles I felt entirely happy.

We had steamed down against a strong tide, so we were half an hour late for luncheon, and the officers had gone down to the saloon, but it was worth being a little after time to see the way they all leapt up and received me like a queen—­making me feel, as I never felt before, the difference between the politeness of the fashionable idlers and the manners of the men who do things.

“Holloa!” they cried.