"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 nothing; and so, for economic penance, smoked to the bitter end, finding the cigar disagreeable but manly.

At all events, homesickness had vanished in a curious impatience for the morrow.