mmon or garden variety, who
first resolved to keep out of a queer business and then, because a girl
looked bothered, plunged into it up to my ears. I succeeded in hiding my
feelings, in looking wooden.

"Please tell me," I responded, "what it is."

"But--I can't explain it." Her gloved hands tightened on the railing.
"And if I ask without explaining, it will seem so--so strange."

"Doubtless," I reflected grimly. But I had to see the thing through now.
"That doesn't matter at all," I assured her civilly through clenched
teeth.

She came closer--so close that her fur coat brushed me, and her breath
touched my cheek; her eyes, like gray stars now that they were less
anxious, went to my head a little, I suppose. Oh, yes, she was lovely.
Of course that was a factor. If she had been past her first youth and
skimpy as to hair, and dowdy, I don't pretend that I should ever have
mixed myself up in the preposterous coil.

"This paper," she whispered, holding out the sheet, "has something in
it. It is not about me; it is not even true. But if it stays aboard
the ship,--if some one sees it, it may make trouble. Oh, you see how it
sounds; I knew you would think me mad!"

"Not in the least." What an absurd rigmarole she was uttering! Yet such
was the spell of her eyes, her voice, her nearness that I merely felt
like saying, "Tell me some more."

"I can't destroy it myself," she went on anxiously. "He--they--mustn't
see me do anything that might lead them to--to guess. But no one will
think of you, nobody will be watching you; so by and by will you weight
the paper with something heavy and drop it across the rail?"

My head was whirling, but a graven image might have envied me my
impassivity. I bowed. "I shall be delighted," I announced banally, "to
do as you say."

Her face flushed to a warm wild-rose tint as she heard me promise it,
and her red lips, parting, took on a tremulous smile.

"Thank you," she murmured in frank gratitude. "I thought--I knew you
would help me!" Then she was gone.

My trance broken I woke to hear myself softly swearing. I consigned
myself to my proper home, an asylum; I wished the girl at Timbuktu,
Kamchatka, Land's End--anywhere except on this ship. As I had told the
agent of the Phillipson Rifles, I am no boy. One can scarcely knock
about the world for thirty years without gaining some of its wisdom; and
of all the appropriate truisms I spared myself not one.

Resentfully I reminded myself