'Forgive me,' Margaret said softly; 'I should have known.'

'No,' Griggs answered after a moment. 'You could not have known. It
happened very long ago, perhaps ten years before you were born.'

Again he turned his sad grey eyes to hers, but no smile lingered now
about the rather stern mouth. The two looked at each other quietly
for five or six seconds, and that may seem a long time. When Margaret
turned away from the elderly man's more enduring gaze, both felt that
there was a bond of sympathy between them which neither had quite
acknowledged till then. There was silence after that, and Margaret
looked out of the window, while her hand unconsciously played with the
book on her knee, lifting the cover a little and letting it fall again
and again.

Suddenly she turned to Griggs once more and held the book out to him
with a smile.

'I'm not an autograph-hunter,' she said, 'but will you write something
on the fly-leaf? Just a word or two, without your name, if you like.
Do you think I'm very sentimental?'

She smiled again, and he took the book from her and produced a pencil.

'It's a book I shall not throw away,' she went on, 'because the man
who wrote it is a great friend of mine, and I have everything he has
ever written. So, as I shall keep it, I want it to remind me that you
and I grew to know each other better on this voyage.'