Dear Guinevere:  I send with this a bit of silk that old Fut’ali insisted on giving to me this morning.  It is that horrid gray color which we both detest.  I know you will never wear it, and you had better give it to Miss Blake to make a toga for her first appearance in the women’s Senate.  LANCELOT.

“With all my heart!” said Mrs. Rayne as I gave back the note.  “You will please us both far more than you can please yourself by wearing the dress with a thought of us.  I wonder why Mr. Rayne calls me ‘Guinevere’?  But he has a new name for me every day, because he does not like my own.”

“What is it?”

“Waitstill.  Did you ever hear it?”

“Never but once,” I said with a sudden tightness in my throat.  I could scarcely speak my thanks for the dress.

“I should never wear it,” said Mrs. Rayne:  “the color is associated with a very painful part of my life.”

“Do you suppose water would spot it?” asked Rhoda, who is of a practical turn of mind.

“Take a bit and try it.”

“Water spots some grays” said Mrs. Rayne with a strange sort of smile as Rhoda went out, “especially salt water.  I spent one night at sea in an open boat, with a gray dress clinging wet and salt to my limbs.  When I tore it off in rags I seemed to shed all the misery I had ever known.  All my life since then has been bright as you see it now.  It would be a bad omen to put on a gray gown again.”

“Then you have made a sea-voyage, Mrs. Rayne?”

“Yes, such a long voyage!—­worse than the ‘Ancient Mariner’s.’  No words can tell how I hate the sea.”  She sighed deeply, with a sudden darkening of her gray eyes till they were almost black, and grasped one wrist hard with the other hand.

A sudden trembling seized me.  I was almost as much agitated as Mrs. Rayne.  I felt that I must clinch the matter somehow, but I took refuge in a platitude to gain time:  “There is such a difference in ships, almost as much as in houses, and the comfort of the voyage depends greatly on that.”

“It may be so,” she said wearily.

“My brother’s ship is old, but it has been refitted lately to something like comfort.  It’s old name was the Sapphire.”

This was my shot, and it hit hard.

“The Sapphire! the Sapphire!” she whispered with dilated eyes.  “Did you ever hear—­did you ever find—­But what nonsense!  You must think me the absurdest of women.”

The color came back to her face, and she laughed quite naturally.

“The fact is, Miss Blake, I was very ill and miserable when I was on shipboard, and to this day any sudden reminder of it gives me a shock.—­Did water spot it?” she said to Rhoda, who came in at this point.

I thought over all the threads of the circumstance that had come into my hand, and like Mr. Browning’s lover I found “a thing to do.”

The next morning I made an excuse to go down to the ship with my brother, and there, by dint of pressure, I got those stained and dingy papers into my possession again.  I had only that day before me, for we were going to a hotel the same evening, and the Raynes were to set out next day for their summer place among the hills, a long way back of Bombay.  Our stay had already delayed their departure.