tfit for
science to be found in the States to your mind, why, I'll improve on
it, sir. And I'm not saying it, as you might suppose, under any
threat, but because I've been thinking it out and I mean it. I'm a
childless man--"

Foe cut him short here. "My only trouble with you, Farrell,"
said he, "is that you may reach your grave without understanding.
If I thought that wasn't preventible somehow, it would save me
trouble to wring your neck here and now and throw you overboard.
As it is--"

But, as it was, along the deck just then came Constantia Denistoun,
with her mother leaning on her arm and a maid following. She
recognised Foe and halted.

"Why, good Heavens! . . . and I'd no idea that you were on the
_Emania_," said she. "Mother, this is Mr. Foe--Roddy's friend,
you know. . . . Or ought I to call you Doctor, or Professor, or
what? . . . You weren't anything of that sort anyhow, when we met--
how many years ago? at Cambridge."

--That, or to that effect. . . . Constantia told me afterwards that
she didn't remember throwing more than a glance at Farrell, whom she
took, very pardonably, to be a chance acquaintance from the
smoking-room, picked up as such acquaintances are picked up on
ship-board. And Farrell stood back a couple of paces. To do him
justice, he was in no wise a thruster.

"It's odd," she went on, "that we haven't run across one another
until this moment. What's your business, over yonder? if that's not
a rude question."

"It's a natural one, anyhow," Foe answered. "My business? Well, it
has been suggested to me that a trip in the States, to see what
they're doing in the way of scientific outfit and, maybe, get hints
for a new laboratory, might not be waste of time."

"Yes, I know; I've heard," she said softly. "It's splendid to find
you taking it like this . . . picking up the pieces, eh? . . .
I wonder if"--she hesitated--"if I might ask you some questions?
. . . Just as much as you choose to tell: but something to put into
a letter to our Roddy, you know. Any news of you will be honey to
him. . . . You'll be writing from New York, of course. But one man
doesn't tell another that he's looking brave and well; and yet that's
often what the other may be most wanting to know."

Foe was touched (so he's told me). He said some ordinary thing that
tried to show he was grateful, and Constantia and her mother passed
on. He had not introduced Farrell.

Constantia told me most of t