"Ah, well. We must not mind these things, I suppose. But I wish I were a man--I should at least escape being called upon and kissed by 'catty' women like Mrs. Bell-Lovatt."
Not once since he returned had Barry caught sight of the woman he had hoped to call his wife, and as the days went by he thought less and less of her and more of Alice Tracey. And his would indeed have been a hard, unimpressionable nature not to have yielded the influence she was surely, but slowly, exercising upon him. She honestly tried to attract him, and now that he was a free man she did not mean to let him go away to sea again without trying to let him understand that she would feel the loss of his society very much.
"If he cared for me ever so much he wouldn't tell me," she thought to herself, "he is that sort
