following at a steady six knots the theatric glare of her
search-light along arsenically green cardboard banks, Rudolph paced the
deck in a mood much simpler and more honest. In vain he tried the
half-baked philosophy of youth. It gave no comfort; and watching the
clear desert stars of two mysterious continents, he fell prey to the
unbounded and unintelligible complexity of man's world. His own career
seemed no more dubious than trivial.

Succeeding days only strengthened this mood. The Red Sea passed in a
dream of homesickness, intolerable heat, of a pale blue surface
stretched before aching eyes, and paler strips of pink and gray coast,
faint and distant. Like dreams, too, passed Aden and Colombo; and then,
suddenly, he woke to the most acute interest.

He had ignored his mess-mates at their second-class table; but when the
new passengers from Colombo came to dinner, he heard behind him the
swish of stiff skirts, felt some one brush his shoulder, and saw,
sliding into the next revolving chair, the vision of a lady in white.

"_Mahlzeit_" she murmured dutifully. But the voice was not German.
Rudolph heard her subside with little flouncings, and felt his ears grow
warm and red. Delighted, embarrassed, he at last took sufficient courage
to steal side-glances.

The first showed her to be young, fair-haired, and smartly attired in
the plainest and coolest of white; the second, not so young, but very
charming, with a demure downcast look, and a deft control of her spoon
that, to Rudolph's eyes, was splendidly fastidious; at the third, he was
shocked to encounter the last flitting light of a counter-glance, from
large, dark-blue eyes, not devoid of amusement.

"She laughs at me!" fumed the young man, inwardly. He was angry,
conscious of those unlucky wing-and-wing ears, vexed at his own
boldness. "I have been offensive. She laughs at me." He generalized from
long inexperience of a subject to which he had given acutely interested
thought: "They always do."

Anger did not prevent him, however, from noting that his neighbor
traveled alone, that she must be an Englishwoman, and yet that she
diffused, somehow, an aura of the Far East and of romance. He shot many
a look toward her deck-chair that evening, and when she had gone below,
strategically bought a cigar, sat down in the chair to light it, and by
a carefully shielded match contrived to read the tag that fluttered on
the arm: "B. Forrester, Hongkong."

Afterward he