alism of an
inherited code. The other had been foolish in the extreme and had drawn
him into the whirlpool of her heedlessness.

In ways as far apart as east and west, each had been fascinating and
each had been beautiful.

The orbit of his rounds carried him several times past a woman, who was
standing unaccompanied at the rail astern. Her face and glance were
turned outward where the propellers were churning up a lather of white
spume and where little eddies of jade and lapis-lazuli raced among the
bubbles.

He felt, at first, no curiosity for the averted face, but finally the
length of time she had been standing there without change of posture,
the unusual slenderness and grace of the figure, and the fact that he
had _not_ seen her features awakened a tepid interest.

But when, for the seventh time, he rounded the white walls of the after
cabin and she turned with a smile of seeming welcome on her lips,
Farquaharson stopped dead. For just a surprised instant he forgot the
requirements of courtesy and glanced about as if instinctively seeking
escape. His jaw stiffened, then with a sense of chagrin for this
gracelessness he stepped forward with a belated cordiality.

But in the brief interval he saw the exquisitely fair coloring of the
woman's cheeks flush pinker, and the lower lip catch between her teeth.

Her eyes, which in the afternoon sun were golden amber, clouded with a
swift shadow of pain which as swiftly vanished.

"I was wondering, Stuart," said Marian Holbury slowly, "whether you
meant to speak to me at all."

"I didn't know you were on this side of the world," he responded with
recovered equanimity.

She leaned against the rail and, while the breeze whipped the sash of
her sweater and her white skirt about her, studied him gravely until he
said: "Meeting you here was such a coincidence that it astonished me ...
don't you find it surprising, too?"

She shook her head.

"No," she said, "I don't. You see I _did_ know that you were on this
side of the globe. I even knew that you would be on board. Lieutenant
Hancock told me."

CHAPTER XVI

Stuart Farquaharson's first impulse upon finding his surprise for the
meeting unshared, was an astonishment at Marian herself. Unless some
great urgency existed for an immediate return to the States he supposed
that she would have avoided sailing with him.

"The circumstance that the one man I knew in Yokohama should also be an
acquaintance of your