"What is it, then?" she asked curiously.

He stood looking out across the roofs and at the distant skyscrapers.
She watched him without speaking. She knew very well that his eyes saw
nothing of the landscape. He was looking back into some world of his
own fancy, back, perhaps, into the shadows of his own life, concerning
which no word that she or any one else in the city had ever heard had
passed his lips.




CHAPTER IV


The two men--Crawshay and Sam Hobson--still a little breathless,
stood at the end of the dock, gazing out towards the river. Around
them was a slowly dispersing crowd of sightseers, friends and
relations of the passengers on board the great American liner,
ploughing her way down the river amidst the shrieks and hoots of her
attendant tugs. Out on the horizon, beyond the Statue of Liberty, two
long, grey, sinister shapes were waiting. Hobson glanced at
them gloomily.

"Guess those are our destroyers going to take the _City of Boston_
some of the way across," he observed. "To think, with all this fuss
about, that she must go and start an hour before her time!"

"It's filthy luck," the Englishman muttered.