ms, and touching my
cap at the end of the voyage for a few shillings in tips?"

"You are bitter."

"Bitter? I ought not to be, with twenty thousand pounds in my pocket."

"Tell me more."

He looked into her beautiful face, animated by genuine interest, and
wondered if all men were willing so readily to obey her.

"It always interests me to hear from the man's own lips how he overcame
obstacles."

"Sometimes I didn't overcome them. I ran away. After all, the strike
in oil was a fluke."

"I don't think so. But go on," she prompted.

"Well, I've been manager of a cocoanut plantation in Penang; I've
helped lay tracks in Upper India; had a hand in some bridges; sold
patent-medicines; worked in a ruby mine; been a haberdasher in the
Whiteaway, Laidlaw shop in Bombay; cut wood in the teak forests; helped
exterminate the plague at Chitor and Udaipur; and never saved a penny.
I never had an adventure in all my life."

"Why, your wanderings were adventures," she insisted. "Think of the
things you could tell!"

"And never will," a smile breaking over his face.

How like Arthur's that smile was! thought the girl. "Romantic persons
never have any adventures. It is to the prosaic these things fall.
Because of their nearness you lose their values."

"There is some difference between romance and adventure. Romance is
what you look forward to; adventure is something you look back upon.
If many disagreeable occupations, hunger and an occasional fisticuff,
may be classed as adventure, then I have had my run of it. But I
always supposed adventure was the finding of treasures, on land and on
sea; of filibustering; of fighting with sabers and pistols, and all
that rigmarole. I can't quite lift my imagination up to the height of
calling my six months' shovel-engineering on _The Galle_ an adventure.
It was brutal hard work; and many times I wanted to jump over. The
Lascars often got out of trouble that way."

"It all depends upon how we look at things." She touched the
parrot-cage with her foot, and Rajah hissed. "What would you say if I
told you that I was unconventional enough to ask the purser to
introduce you?"

The amazement in his face was answer enough.

"Don't you suppose," she went on, "the picture you presented, standing
on that ledge, the red light of the torch on your face, the bird-cage
in your hand,--don't you suppose you roused my sense the romantic to
the highest pitch? Parrot & Co.!" with a wa