He had ignored his mess-mates at their second-class table; but when the new passengers from Colombo came to dinner, he heard behind him the swish of stiff skirts, felt some one brush his shoulder, and saw, sliding into the next revolving chair, the vision of a lady in white.

“Mahlzeit” she murmured dutifully.  But the voice was not German.  Rudolph heard her subside with little flouncings, and felt his ears grow warm and red.  Delighted, embarrassed, he at last took sufficient courage to steal side-glances.

The first showed her to be young, fair-haired, and smartly attired in the plainest and coolest of white; the second, not so young, but very charming, with a demure downcast look, and a deft control of her spoon that, to Rudolph’s eyes, was splendidly fastidious; at the third, he was shocked to encounter the last flitting light of a counter-glance, from large, dark-blue eyes, not devoid of amusement.

“She laughs at me!” fumed the young man, inwardly.  He was angry, conscious of those unlucky wing-and-wing ears, vexed at his own boldness.  “I have been offensive.  She laughs at me.”  He generalized from long inexperience of a subject to which he had given acutely interested thought:  “They always do.”

Anger did not prevent him, however, from noting that his neighbor traveled alone, that she must be an Englishwoman, and yet that she diffused, somehow, an aura of the Far East and of romance.  He shot many a look toward her deck-chair that evening, and when she had gone below, strategically bought a cigar, sat down in the chair to light it, and by a carefully shielded match contrived to read the tag that fluttered on the arm:  “B.  Forrester, Hongkong.”

Afterward he remembered that by early daylight he might have read it for nothing; and so, for economic penance, smoked to the bitter end, finding the cigar disagreeable but manly.  At all events, homesickness had vanished in a curious impatience for the morrow.  Miss Forrester:  he would sit beside Miss Forrester at table.  If only they both were traveling first-class!—­then she might be a great lady.  To be enamored of a countess, now—­A cigar, after all, was the proper companion of bold thoughts.

At breakfast, recalling her amusement, he remained silent and wooden.  At tiffin his heart leaped.

“You speak English, I’m sure, don’t you?” Miss Forrester was saying, in a pleasant, rather drawling voice.  Her eyes were quite serious now, and indeed friendly.  Confusion seized him.

“I have less English to amuse myself with the ladies,” he answered wildly.  Next moment, however, he regained that painful mastery of the tongue which had won his promotion as agent, and stammered:  “Pardon.  I would mean, I speak so badly as not to entertain her.”

“Indeed, you speak very nicely,” she rejoined, with such a smile as no woman had ever troubled to bestow on him.  “That will be so pleasant, for my German is shocking.”