Peter smiled his grave smile, and vouchsafed nothing. The girl in the
steerage had returned to her sewing and was apparently quite oblivious
of his presence. And still that look of demure, wistful appeal stood
out in his memory.

Romola Borria was murmuring something, the context of which was not
quite clear to him.

"Eh? I beg pardon?"

"It is quite dreadful, this traveling all alone," she remarked.

"Yes," he admitted. "Sometimes I bore myself into a state of agony."

"And it breeds such strange, such unexplainable desires and caprices,"
the girl went on in her cultivated, honeyed tones. "Strangers
sometimes are so--so cold. For instance, yourself."

"I?" exclaimed Peter, supporting himself on the stanchion. "Why, I'm
the friendliest man in the world!"

Romola Borria pursed her lips and studied him analytically.

"I wonder----" she began, and stopped, fretting her lip. "I should
like to ask you a very blunt and a very bold question." Her expression
was darkly puzzled.

"Go right ahead," urged Peter amiably, "don't mind me."

"Why I speak in this way," she explained, "is that since I ran away
from Hong Kong----"

"Oh, you ran away from Hong Kong!"

"Of course!" She said it in a way that indicated a certain lack of
understanding on his part. "Since I ran away from Hong Kong I have
been looking, looking for such--for such a man as you appear to be,
to--to confide in."

"Don't you suppose a woman would do almost as well?" spoke Peter, who,
through experience, had grown to dislike the father-confessor role.

"If you don't _care_ to listen----" she began, as though he had hurt
her.

"I am all ears," stated Peter, with his most convincing smile.

"And I have changed my mind," said Romola Borria with a disdainful toss
of her pretty head. "Besides, I think the Herr Captain would have a
word with you."

The fat and happy captain of the _Persian Gulf_ occupied the breadth if
not the height of the doorway, wearing his boyish grin, and Peter
hastened to his side with a murmured apology to the girl as he left her.

He merely desired to have transmitted an unimportant clearance message
to the Batavia office, to state that all was well and that the
thrust-bearing, repaired, was now performing "smoot'ly."

Dropping the hard rubber head-phones over his ears, Peter listened to
the air, and in a moment the silver crash of the white spark came from
the doorway.

Romola Borria stared long and venomou