“I’ve left my ship manners hanging up behind the door with my dryadhood.  I shan’t use them in New York, either!”

“Well—­I’m sorry!”

“I don’t know why you should be.”  If she had not stared hard at Miss Carroll’s trunk, and tried anxiously to make out the name on a very small label, she would have done what she had boasted of never doing, whatever the world did to her:  she would have cried.  As it was, she wore the expression of a budding basilisk.

“Don’t you know?  Well, then, you didn’t realize what it meant to me to have you for a friend.”

“I really didn’t think much about it, Mr. Rolls!”

“Evidently not.  But I did.  Look here, Miss Child.  Did my sister put you against me—­or our friendship—­in any way?”

“What an extraordinary idea!” sneered Winifred.  “She spoke very nicely of you, as far as I can remember, and said you were a dear brother.”

“Then why are you so unkind to me now after being nice on the ship?”

“Oh, that!  It was for a cinema, a motion picture.  Didn’t you understand?”

This slapped Peter in the face:  that she should retort with flippant slang, when he was earnestly begging for an explanation.  At last she had succeeded in freezing him.

“I’m afraid I didn’t quite understand,” he said in a new tone which she had not heard before.  Mr. Balm of Gilead, alias Peter Pan, had suddenly grown up, and as Peter Rolls, Jr., was all politeness and conventionality.

“I do understand now, though.  Well, Miss Child, I must—­thank that ‘cinema’ for some very pleasant hours.  Here comes a man to look at your baggage.  Just remind him that you’re a British subject, and he won’t make you any trouble.  Neither will I!” Peter’s hat was off, but his smile could have been knocked off only with a hammer.

“Good-bye,” replied Win hastily, frightened at her own appalling success as a basilisk.  “And thank you—­for your part of the cinema.”

“I’m afraid I don’t deserve any credit.  Good-bye.  And good luck.”

He was gone—­but no, not quite.  Without turning round to look at her again, he was stopping to speak with the Irish-faced servant of the customs.  The latter nodded and even touched his cap.  Peter Rolls certainly had a way with him.  But Win already knew this, to her sorrow.  She was glad she had thought of that horrid speech about the cinema.  The man deserved it.

“That’s the last I shall see of him!” she said to herself almost viciously, as the Irish-American official spied upon her toque the wing of a fowl domesticated since the ark.  Yet for the second time Peter came back, stiffly lifting his hat.

“I only wanted to say,” he explained, “that, cinema or no cinema, I hope, if I can be of service now or later, you will allow me the privilege.  My address—–­”

“I have your sister’s, thank you,” she cut his words short as with a pair of scissors.  “That’s the same thing, isn’t it?”