“And yet,” I put in, with a meditative air, “I have never observed that waiters are so much better off than the rest of the community.  They seem to me—­”

“Don’t talk nonsense.  It is you who are wandering from the question now.  Please return to it.”

I returned at once.  “So I am to depend on what turns up?”

“Yes.  Leave that to me.  When we see our fellow-passengers on the Bombay steamer, I shall soon discover some ostensible reason why we two should be travelling through India with one of them.”

“Well, you are a witch, Hilda,” I answered.  “I found that out long ago; but if you succeed between here and Bombay in inventing a Mission, I shall begin to believe you are even more of a witch than I ever thought you.”

At Aden we changed into a P. and O. steamer.  Our first evening out on our second cruise was a beautiful one; the bland Indian Ocean wore its sweetest smile for us.  We sat on deck after dinner.  A lady with a husband came up from the cabin while we sat and gazed at the placid sea.  I was smoking a quiet digestive cigar.  Hilda was seated in her deck chair next to me.

The lady with the husband looked about her for a vacant space on which to place the chair a steward was carrying for her.  There was plenty of room on the quarter-deck.  I could not imagine why she gazed about her with such obtrusive caution.  She inspected the occupants of the various chairs around with deliberate scrutiny through a long-handled tortoise-shell optical abomination.  None of them seemed to satisfy her.  After a minute’s effort, during which she also muttered a few words very low to her husband, she selected an empty spot midway between our group and the most distant group on the other side of us.  In other words, she sat as far away from everybody present as the necessarily restricted area of the quarter-deck permitted.

Hilda glanced at me and smiled.  I snatched a quick look at the lady again.  She was dressed with an amount of care and a smartness of detail that seemed somewhat uncalled for on the Indian Ocean.  A cruise on a P. and O. steamer is not a garden party.  Her chair was most luxurious, and had her name painted on it, back and front, in very large letters, with undue obtrusiveness.  I read it from where I sat, “Lady Meadowcroft.”

The owner of the chair was tolerably young, not bad looking, and most expensively attired.  Her face had a certain vacant, languid, half ennuyee air which I have learned to associate with women of the nouveau-riche type—­women with small brains and restless minds, habitually plunged in a vortex of gaiety, and miserable when left for a passing moment to their own resources.

Hilda rose from her chair, and walked quietly forward towards the bow of the steamer.  I rose, too, and accompanied her.  “Well?” she said, with a faint touch of triumph in her voice when we had got out of earshot.