Part 25 (2/2)

”Eh? I beg pardon?”

”It is quite dreadful, this traveling all alone,” she remarked.

”Yes,” he admitted. ”Sometimes I bore myself into a state of agony.”

”And it breeds such strange, such unexplainable desires and caprices,”

the girl went on in her cultivated, honeyed tones. ”Strangers sometimes are so--so cold. For instance, yourself.”

”I?” exclaimed Peter, supporting himself on the stanchion. ”Why, I'm the friendliest man in the world!”

Romola Borria pursed her lips and studied him a.n.a.lytically.

”I wonder----” she began, and stopped, fretting her lip. ”I should like to ask you a very blunt and a very bold question.” Her expression was darkly puzzled.

”Go right ahead,” urged Peter amiably, ”don't mind me.”

”Why I speak in this way,” she explained, ”is that since I ran away from Hong Kong----”

”Oh, you ran away from Hong Kong!”

”Of course!” She said it in a way that indicated a certain lack of understanding on his part. ”Since I ran away from Hong Kong I have been looking, looking for such--for such a man as you appear to be, to--to confide in.”

”Don't you suppose a woman would do almost as well?” spoke Peter, who, through experience, had grown to dislike the father-confessor role.

”If you don't _care_ to listen----” she began, as though he had hurt her.

”I am all ears,” stated Peter, with his most convincing smile.

”And I have changed my mind,” said Romola Borria with a disdainful toss of her pretty head. ”Besides, I think the Herr Captain would have a word with you.”

The fat and happy captain of the _Persian Gulf_ occupied the breadth if not the height of the doorway, wearing his boyish grin, and Peter hastened to his side with a murmured apology to the girl as he left her.

He merely desired to have transmitted an unimportant clearance message to the Batavia office, to state that all was well and that the thrust-bearing, repaired, was now performing ”smoot'ly.”

Dropping the hard rubber head-phones over his ears, Peter listened to the air, and in a moment the silver crash of the white spark came from the doorway.

Romola Borria stared long and venomously at the little Chinese maiden, who was sewing away industriously as she rocked to and fro on the hatch. Immersed in her own thoughts the girl, removing her quick eyes from the flying needle, glanced up at the deep-blue sky, and, smiling, s.h.i.+vered in a sort of ecstasy.

CHAPTER III

At dinner Peter met the notables. It seemed the fat and handsome captain had taken a fancy to him. And it was as Peter had deduced earlier. These pa.s.sengers were stodgy Dutchmen, each with a little world of his own, and forming the sole orbit of that little world. For the most part they were plantation owners escaping the seasonal heat for the cool breezes of a vacation in j.a.pan, boastful of their possessions, smug in their Dutch self-complacency, and somewhat gluttonous in their manner of eating.

The fat captain beamed. The fat plantation owners gorged themselves and jabbered. The three-piece orchestra played light opera that the world had forgotten. The company became light-hearted as more frosty bottles of that exotic drink, _arracka_, were disgorged by the _Persian Gulf's_ excellent ice-box. And all the while, speaking in light, soothing tones, Romola Borria gazed alluringly into the watchful eyes of Peter Moore.

At length the chairs were pushed back, and Peter, with this fairy-like creature in a dinner-gown of most fetching pink gossamer clinging to his arm, took to the deck for an after-dinner Abdullah.

They chatted in low, confiding tones of the people in the dining-room.

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