When she was fairly off he returned to his room to change the thick coat he had put on at the instigation of the early morning air.  His room-mate was still absent, but he was now represented by his state-room baggage, and Burnamy tried to infer him from it.  He perceived a social quality in his dress-coat case, capacious gladstone, hat-box, rug, umbrella, and sole-leather steamer trunk which he could not attribute to his own equipment.  The things were not so new as his; they had an effect of polite experience, with a foreign registry and customs label on them here and there.  They had been chosen with both taste and knowledge, and Burnamy would have said that they were certainly English things, if it had not been for the initials U. S. A. which followed the name of E. B. Triscoe on the end of the steamer trunk showing itself under the foot of the lower berth.

The lower berth had fallen to Burnamy through the default of the passenger whose ticket he had got at the last hour; the clerk in the steamer office had been careful to impress him with this advantage, and he now imagined a trespass on his property.  But he reassured himself by a glance at his ticket, and went out to watch the ship’s passage down the stream and through the Narrows.  After breakfast he came to his room again, to see what could be done from his valise to make him look better in the eyes of a girl whom he had seen across the table; of course he professed a much more general purpose.  He blamed himself for not having got at least a pair of the white tennis-shoes which so many of the passengers were wearing; his russet shoes had turned shabby on his feet; but there was a, pair of enamelled leather boots in his bag which he thought might do.

His room was in the group of cabins on the upper deck; he had already missed his way to it once by mistaking the corridor which it opened into; and he was not sure that he was not blundering again when he peered down the narrow passage where he supposed it was.  A lady was standing at an open state-room door, resting her hands against the jambs and leaning forward with her head within and talking to some one there.  Before he could draw back and try another corridor he heard her say:  “Perhaps he’s some young man, and wouldn’t care.”

Burnamy could not make out the answer that came from within.  The lady spoke again in a tone of reluctant assent, “No, I don’t suppose you could; but if he understood, perhaps he would offer.”

She drew her head out of the room, stepping back a pace, and lingering a moment at the threshold.  She looked round over her shoulder and discovered Burnamy, where he stood hesitating at the head of the passage.  She ebbed before him, and then flowed round him in her instant escape; with some murmured incoherencies about speaking to her father, she vanished in a corridor on the other side of the ship, while he stood staring into the doorway of his room.

He had seen that she was the young lady for whom he had come to put on his enamelled shoes, and he saw that the person within was the elderly gentleman who had sat next her at breakfast.  He begged his pardon, as he entered, and said he hoped he should not disturb him.  “I’m afraid I left my things all over the place, when I got up this morning.”