“I do not suppose we would have thought of it, save that Elizabeth—Mrs. MacArthur—is a friend of mine, from our schoolroom days,” she said, Hammond having exclaimed over her having made so long a journey. “But having made your own home in so distant a country as China, can you be so surprised that others might wish to see more of the world than encompassed by a single parish in Devonshire, and six weeks in London? I was glad of the notion when she proposed our coming and taking up a grant of land; her husband would have had work for mine. But there is nothing for a woman alone to do here.”

Except to marry again, she did not say, and her speaking look at the company—grown coarser by the moment, and more loud—made clear she did not see much to admire in the local prospects.

“You might return to England,” Hammond said.

“And go back to Devonshire, and tat lace with my mother-in-law, while her pug snores at our feet,” she said, dryly: it did not seem the sort of portrait which would appeal to a woman who had willingly followed her husband across the world to a half-established colony. “I understand you are gone away again shortly, yourselves?”

“As soon as we have our tide, and the wind is in the west,” Hammond said, poetic but quite inaccurate, as making sail with a westerly wind from her present anchorage would serve better to drive the Allegiance onto the harbor rocks than to the open ocean. “But I do hope to return to England, ma’am, someday. I do not grudge my country any service, but I am not so peripatetic as that; and surely the delights of home must call still more to a woman’s heart.”

“And you, Captain Laurence?” she asked. “Does your heart yearn for a quiet retirement at the end of your service, and a house in the country?”

There was something a little mocking in her tone. “Only if there were room enough for a dragon,” Laurence said, and excused himself to step outside and take the air: in the dark, with the lights of the house shining and the garden full of palm-trees and fruit bats obscured, he might have been at exactly that sort of manor, which he might indeed have imagined for himself, six years and a lifetime ago.