swish of stiff skirts, felt some one brush his shoulder, and saw,
sliding into the next revolving chair, the vision of a lady in white.

"_Mahlzeit_" she murmured dutifully. But the voice was not German.
Rudolph heard her subside with little flouncings, and felt his ears grow
warm and red. Delighted, embarrassed, he at last took sufficient courage
to steal side-glances.

The first showed her to be young, fair-haired, and smartly attired in
the plainest and coolest of white; the second, not so young, but very
charming, with a demure downcast look, and a deft control of her spoon
that, to Rudolph's eyes, was splendidly fastidious; at the third, he was
shocked to encounter the last flitting light of a counter-glance, from
large, dark-blue eyes, not devoid of amusement.

"She laughs at me!" fumed the young man, inwardly. He was angry,
conscious of those unlucky wing-and-wing ears, vexed at his own
boldness. "I have been offensive. She laughs at me." He generalized from
long inexperience of a subject to which he had given acutely interested
thought: "They always do."

Anger did not prevent him, however, from noting that his neighbor
traveled alone, that she must be an Englishwoman, and yet that she
diffused, somehow, an aura of the Far East and of romance. He shot many
a look toward her deck-chair that evening, and when she had gone below,
strategically bought a cigar, sat down in the chair to light it, and by
a carefully shielded match contrived to read the tag that fluttered on
the arm: "B. Forrester, Hongkong."

Afterward he remembered that by early daylight he might have read it for