She had seen Mr. Van Torp and Paul Griggs walking together and coming towards her.

The millionaire was shorter than his companion and more clumsily made, though not by any means a stout man.  Though he did not look like a soldier he had about him the very combative air which belongs to so many modern financiers of the Christian breed.  There was the bull-dog jaw, the iron mouth, and the aggressive blue eye of the man who takes and keeps by force rather than by astuteness.  Though his face had lines in it and his complexion was far from brilliant he looked scarcely forty years of age, and his short, rough, sandy hair had not yet begun to turn grey.

He was not ugly, but Margaret had always seen something in his face that repelled her.  It was some lack of proportion somewhere, which she could not precisely define; it was something that was out of the common type of faces, but that was disquieting rather than interesting.  Instead of wondering what it meant, those who noticed it wished it were not there.

Margaret was sure she could distinguish his heavy step from Griggs’s when he was near her, but she would not look up from her book till he stopped and spoke to her.

‘Good-morning, Madame Cordova; how are you this morning?’ he inquired, holding out his hand.  ‘You didn’t expect to see me on board, did you?’

His tone was hard and business-like, but he lifted his yachting cap politely as he held out his hand.  Margaret hesitated a moment before taking it, and when she moved her own he was already holding his out to Miss More.

‘Good-morning, Miss More; how are you this morning?’

Miss More leaned forward and put down one foot as if she would have risen in the presence of the great man, but he pushed her back by her hand which he held, and proceeded to shake hands with the little girl.

‘Good-morning, Miss Ida; how are you this morning?’

Margaret felt sure that if he had shaken hands with a hundred people he would have repeated the same words to each without any variation.  She looked at Griggs imploringly, and glanced at his vacant chair on her right side.  He did not answer by sitting down, because the action would have been too like deliberately telling Mr. Van Torp to go away, but he began to fold up the chair as if he were going to take it away, and then he seemed to find that there was something wrong with one of its joints, and altogether it gave him a good deal of trouble, and made it quite impossible for the great man to get any nearer to Margaret.

Little Ida had taken Mr. Van Torp’s proffered hand, and had watched his hard lips when he spoke.  She answered quite clearly and rather slowly, in the somewhat monotonous voice of those born deaf who have learned to speak.

‘I’m very well, thank you, Mr. Van Torp.  I hope you are quite well.’

Margaret heard, and saw the child’s face, and at once decided that, if the little girl knew of her own relationship to Ida Bamberger, she was certainly ignorant of the fact that her half-sister had been engaged to Mr. Van Torp, when she had died so suddenly less than a week ago.  Little Ida’s manner strengthened the impression in Margaret’s mind that the millionaire was having her educated by Miss More.  Yet it seemed impossible that the rich old Senator should not have left her well provided.