s of prey wheeling in
ever diminishing circles above their quarry--drifted imperceptibly but
steadily aft, toward the smoking-room. The two indispensable adjuncts to
a successful voyage had already put in their appearance: _item_, the
Pest, an overdressed, overgrown, shrill-voiced female-child, blundering
into everybody's way and shrieking impertinences; _item_, a short,
stout, sedulously hilarious gentleman who oozed public-spirited
geniality at every pore and insisted on buttonholing inoffensive
strangers and demanding that they enter an embryonic deck-quoit
tournament--in short, discovering every known symptom of being the Life
and Soul of the Ship.

Staff dodged both by grace of discretion and good fortune, and having
found his deck-chair, dropped into it with a sigh of content, composing
himself for rest and thought. His world seemed very bright with promise,
just then; he felt that, if he had acted on impetuous impulse, he had
not acted unwisely: only a few more hours--then the pause at
Queenstown--then the brief, seven-day stretch across the Atlantic to
home and Alison Landis!

It seemed almost too good to be true. He all but purred with his content
in the prospect.

Of course, he had a little work to do, but he didn't mind that; it would
help immensely to beguile the tedium of the voyage; and all he required
in order to do it well was the moral courage to shut himself up for a
few hours each day and to avoid as far as possible social
entanglements....

At just about this stage in his meditations he was somewhat rudely
brought back to earth--or, more properly, to deck.

A voice shrieked excitedly: "_Why_, Mr. Staff!"

To be precise, it miscalled him "Stahf": a shrill, penetrating,
overcultivated, American voice making an attempt only semi-successful to
cope with the broad vowels of modern English enunciation.

Staff looked up, recognised its owner, and said beneath his breath: "O
Lord!"--his soul crawling with recognition. But nothing of this was
discernible in the alacrity with which he jumped up and bent over a bony
but bedizened hand.

"Mrs. Ilkington!" he said.

"R'ally," said the lady, "the world _is_ ve-ry small, isn't it?"

She was a lean, angular, inordinately vivacious body whose years, which
were many more than forty, were making a brave struggle to masquerade as
thirty. She was notorious for her execrable taste in gowns and jewelry,
but her social position was impregnable, and her avowed m