"I am fully capable of speaking to him without any introduction
whatever." She laughed again. "It will be very kind of you."

When he had gone she mused over this impulse so alien to her character.
An absolute stranger, a man with a past, perhaps a fugitive from
justice; and because he looked like Arthur Ellison, she was seeking his
acquaintance. Something, then, could break through her reserve and
aloofness? She had traveled from San Francisco to Colombo, unattended
save by an elderly maiden who had risen by gradual stages from nurse to
companion, but who could not be made to remember that she was no longer
a nurse. In all these four months Elsa had not made half a dozen
acquaintances, and of these she had not sought one. Yet, she was
asking to meet a stranger whose only recommendation was a singular
likeness to another man. The purser was right. It was very irregular.

"Parrot & Co.!" she murmured. She searched among the phantoms moving
to and fro upon the ledge; but the man with the cage was gone. It was
really uncanny.

She dropped her arms from the rail and went to her stateroom and
dressed for dinner. She did not give her toilet any particular care.
There was no thought of conquest, no thought of dazzling the man in
khaki. It was the indolence and carelessness of the East, where
clothes become only necessities and are no longer the essentials of
adornment.

Elsa Chetwood was twenty-five, lithely built, outwardly reposeful, but
dynamic within. Education, environment and breeding had somewhat
smothered the glowing fires. She was a type of the ancient repression
of woman, which finds its exceptions in the Aspasias and Helens and