Lindsay listened with a look of accustomed happiness.

“You weren’t at that end of the ship!” he demanded.

“Of course I was—­we all were.  And some of us, little Miss Stace, for instance—­thankful enough at the prospect of cold meat and sardines for tea every night for a whole month.  And after Suez ices for dinner on Sundays.  It was luxury.”

Lindsay was pulling an aggrieved moustache.  “I don’t call it fair or friendly,” he said, “when you know how easily it could have been arranged.  Your own sense of the fitness of things should have told you that the second-class saloon was no place for you.  For you!”

Plainly she did not intend to argue the point.  She poised her chin in her hand and looked away over his head, and he could not help seeing, as he had seen before, that her eyes were beautiful.  But this had been so long acknowledged between them that she could hardly have been conscious that she was insisting on it afresh.  Then, by the time he might have thought her launched upon a different meditation, her mind swept back to his protest, like a whimsical bird.

“I didn’t want to extract anything from the mercantile community of Calcutta in advance,” she said.  “It would be most unbusinesslike.  Stanhope has been equal to bringing us out; but I quite see myself, as leading lady, taking round the hat before the end of the season.  Then I think,” she said with defiance, “that I shall avoid you.”

“And pray why?”

“Because you would put too much in.  According to your last letters you are getting beastly rich.  You would take all the tragedy out of the situation, and my experience would vanish in your cheque.”

“I don’t know why my feelings should always be cuffed out of the way of your experiences,” Lindsay said.  She retorted, “Oh, yes, you do;” and they regarded each other through an instant’s silence with visible good fellowship.

“A reasonably strong company this time?” Lindsay asked.

“Thank you.  ‘Company’ is gratifying.  For a month we have been a ’troupe’—­in the first-class end.  Fairish.  Bad to middling.  Fifteen of us, and when we are not doing Hamlet and Ophelia we can please with the latest thing in rainbow chiffon done on mirrors with a thousand candle-power.  Bradley and I will have to do most of the serious work.  But I have improved—­oh, a lot.  You wouldn’t know my Lady Whippleton.”

It was a fervid announcement, but it carried an implication which appeared to prevent Lindsay’s kindling.

“Then Bradley is here too?” he remarked.

“Oh, yes,” she said; and an instinct sheathed itself in her face.  “But it is much better than it was, really.  He is hardly ever troublesome now.  He understands.  And he teaches me a great deal more than I can tell you.  You know,” she asserted, with the effect of taking an independent view, “as an artist he has my unqualified respect.”