advance--"and she was desperately seedy, poor girl. I looked after her a
little, but it was mistaken kindness, for now she's got me on her mind.
And as the two hundred and eighty million benighted souls of India are
her continual concern, I seem a superfluity. To think of being the two
hundred and eighty-first millionth oppresses one."

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.