“Oh, Mr. Vandover!”

Vandover paused a moment, looking back.

“Where are you going?” she went on.  “Didn’t you see me here?  Don’t you want to come and talk to me?”

“No,” answered Vandover, smiling good-humouredly, trying to be as polite as was possible.  “No, I don’t.”  Then he took a sudden resolution, and added gravely, “I don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

In his stateroom, as he sat on the edge of his berth winding his watch before going to bed, he thought over what he had said.  “That was a mean way to talk to a girl,” he told himself, “but,” he added, “it’s the only thing to do.  I simply couldn’t start in again after all that’s happened.  Oh, yes, that was the right thing to do!”

He felt a glow of self-respect for his firmness and his decision, a pride in the unexpected strength, the fine moral rigour that he had developed at the critical moment.  He could turn sharp around when he wanted to, after all.  Ah, yes, that was the only thing to do if one was to begin all over again and live down what had happened.  He wished that the governor might know how well he had acted.

Chapter Nine

Vandover stayed for two weeks at Coronado Beach and managed to pass the time very pleasantly.  He was fortunate enough to find a party at the hotel whom he knew very well.  In the morning they bathed or sailed on the bay, and in the afternoon rode out with a pack of greyhounds and coursed jack-rabbits on the lower end of the island.  Vandover’s good spirits began to come back to him, his appetite returned, his nerves steadied themselves, he slept eight hours every night.  But for all that he did not think that things were the same with him.  He said to himself that he was a changed man; that he was older, more serious.

During this time he received several letters from his father which he answered very promptly.  In the course of their correspondence it was arranged that they should both leave for Europe on the twenty-fifth of that month, and that consequently, Vandover should return to the city not later than the fifteenth.  Vandover was having such a good time, however, that he stayed over the regular steamer in order to go upon a moonlight picnic down on the beach.  The next afternoon he took passage for San Francisco on a second-class boat.

This homeward passage turned out to be one long misery for Vandover.  He had never been upon a second-class boat before and had never imagined that anything could be so horribly uncomfortable or disagreeable.  The Mazatlan was overcrowded, improperly ballasted, and rolled continually.  The table was bad, the accommodations inadequate, the passengers hopelessly uncongenial.  Cold and foggy weather accompanied the boat continually.  The same endless procession of bleached hills still filed past under the mist, going now in the opposite direction, and the same interminable game of whist was played in the smoking-room, only with greasier, second-class cards, amidst the acrid smoke of second-class tobacco.  At supper, the first day out, a little Jew who sat next to Vandover, and who invariably wore a plush skull-cap with ear-laps, tried to sell him two flawed and yellow diamonds.