There was still the pity of understanding in Ruth’s eyes.  Perhaps it was loneliness.  Perhaps he had lost his loved ones and was wandering over the world seeking forgetfulness.  But he would die if he continued in this course.  They were alike in one phase—­loveless and lonely.  If he died, here in this hotel, who would care?  Or if she died, who would care?

A queer desire blossomed in her heart:  to go to him, urge him to see the folly of trying to forget.  Of what use was the temporary set-back to memory, when it always returned with redoubled poignancy?

Then came another thought, astonishing.  This was the first young man who had drawn from her something more than speculative interest.  True, on board the ships she had watched young men from afar, but only with that normal curiosity which is aroused in the presence of any new species.  But after Singapore she found herself enduing them with the characteristics of the heroes in the novels she had just read for the first time.  This one was Henry Esmond, that one the melancholy Marius, and so forth and so on; never any villains.  It wasn’t worth while to invest imaginatively a man with evil projects simply because he was physically ugly.

Some day she wanted to be loved as Marius loved Cosette; but there was another character which bit far more deeply into her mind.  Why?  Because she knew him in life, because, so long as she could remember, he had crossed and recrossed her vision—­Sidney Carton.  The wastrel, the ne’er-do-well, who went mostly nobly to a fine end.

Here, then, but for the time and place, might be another Sidney Carton.  Given the proper incentive, who could say that he might not likewise go nobly to some fine end?  She thrilled.  To find the incentive!  But how?  Thither and yon the idea roved, seeking the way.  But always this new phase in life which civilization called convention threw up barrier after barrier.

She could not go to him with a preachment against strong drink; she knew from experience that such a plan would be wasted effort.  Had she not seen them go forth with tracts in their pockets and grins in their beards?  To set fire to his imagination, to sting his sense of chivalry into being, to awaken his manhood, she must present some irresistible project.  She recalled that day of the typhoon and the sloop crashing on the outer reefs.  The heroism of two beach combers had saved all on board and their own manhood as well.

“Are you returning to Hong-Kong to-morrow by the day boat?”

For a moment Ruth was astonished at the sound of the spinster’s voice.  She had, by the magic of recollection, set the picture of the typhoon between herself and her table companions:  the terrible rollers thundering on the white shore, the deafening bellow of the wind, the bending and snapping palms, the thatches of the native huts scattering inland, the blur of sand dust, and those two outcasts defying the elements.