There were even rosy prophecies." Farquaharson winced a little.

"She is married," he said evenly, though with an effort. "She quite recently married a gentleman by the name of Eben Tollman."

"Oh, then I was misinformed. Give me her address if you know it and I'll send my overdue congratulations."

Farquaharson complied with that obedience to social necessity which made him conceal the fact that, for him, this reunion with an old friend had been robbed of its savor and turned into a series of unhappy memories.

"This evening you are coming aboard to dine with me," announced Hancock when he had finished his drink and risen, "and after dinner a handful of people will arrive for an informal dance on deck."

But Farquaharson gave an excuse. He felt weary and shrank from those inevitable confidences which must ensue. This evening he was leaving for Tokyo and would reach Yokohama on his return only in time to make his steamer for Honolulu. Jimmy Hancock was full of regret. His own cruiser, he said, would sail to-morrow for Nagasaki.

Stuart's return from Tokyo and Nikko put him in Yokohama just before his steamer's sailing time. So it happened that he went over the gang plank of the _Nippon Maru_ as the whistle was warning visitors ashore.

Having no acquaintances among the figures that lined the deck rail behind a flutter of handkerchiefs, he went to the smoking-lounge where for two hours he busied himself with his author's routine of note books.

It was mid-afternoon when he emerged among those fellow passengers who had long ago claimed their steamer chairs and dedicated themselves to the idleness of the voyage.

Stuart began pacing the boat deck with the adequate companionship of his pipe. He was not lonely for the society of men and women. In his own mind he put a stress of emphasis on women. Two of them had touched his life closely enough to alter its currents. One, he had lost through his own folly and her inability to free herself from the sectionalism of an inherited code. The other had been foolish in the extreme and had drawn him into the whirlpool of her heedlessness.

In ways as far apart as east and west, each had been fascinating and each had been beautiful.

The orbit of his rounds carried him several times past a woman, who was standing unaccompanied at the rail astern. Her face and glance were turned outward where the propellers were churning up a lather of white spume and where little eddies of jade and lapis-lazuli raced among the bubbles.

He felt, at first, no curiosity for the averted face, but finally the length of time she had been standing there without change of posture, the unusual slenderness and grace of the figure, and the fact that he had _not_ seen her features awakened a tepid interest.

But when, for the seventh time, he rounded the white walls of the after cabin and she turned with a smile of seeming welcome on her lips, Farquaharson stopped dead. For just a surprised instant he forgot the requirements of courtesy and glanced about as if instinctively seeking escape. His jaw stiffened, then with a sense of chagrin for this gracelessness he stepped forward with a belated cordiality.

But in the brief interval he saw the exquisitely fair coloring of the woman's cheeks flush pinker, and the lower lip catch between her teeth.

Her eyes, which in the afternoon sun were golden amber, clouded with a swift shadow of pain which as swiftly vanished.

"I was wondering, Stuart," said Marian Holbury slowly, "whether you meant to speak to me at all."

"I didn't know you were on this side of the world," he responded with recovered equanimity.

She leaned against the rail and, while the breeze whipped the sash of her sweater and her white skirt about her, studied him gravely until he said: "Meeting you here was such a coincidence that it astonished me ...

don't you find it surprising, too?"

She shook her head.

"No," she said, "I don't. You see I _did_ know that you were on this side of the globe. I even knew that you would be on board. Lieutenant Hancock told me."

CHAPTER XVI

Stuart Farquaharson's first impulse upon finding his surprise for the meeting unshared, was an astonishment at Marian herself. Unless some great urgency existed for an immediate return to the States he supposed that she would have avoided sailing with him.

"The circumstance that the one man I knew in Yokohama should also be an acquaintance of yours only heightens the effect of the coincidence," he hazarded, and his companion smiled as though amused at some unimpaired element of humor as she navely responded: "Yes--except that in a foreign town we would be apt to meet the same people."

However it had happened, thought Stuart, it was a deplorable accident: their being thrown together for ten days in the narrowed companionship of a sea-voyage. For her, even more than himself, it must bring back the painful notoriety of their last companionship.

It had all been so bootless and uncalled for! Marian Holbury might have divorced her husband had she wished, and remained unstigmatized. Yet she had, by yielding to an ungoverned impulse, reversed their positions of justification. Now the news of their names on the same sailing lists would come to ears at home and set tongues wagging afresh. There had been enough of that.

As she stood there regarding him quietly, with the thorough self-possession of her sex and her class, he reminded himself that there was no profit in a sulkiness of attitude.

"What are your sentiments," he inquired, "regarding a cup of tea?" And she laughed frankly and easily as she responded:

"They are of the friendliest." Together they turned and went toward the nearest white-jacketed deck steward.

As he made a pretense of sipping his tea Farquaharson admitted to himself that the lady whom he was meeting after a long interval had lost nothing of her charm.

The ten days of enforced companionship would at all events be relieved of tedium, but he was in a quandary as to what should be his attitude.

Later in the seclusion of the smoking-room he shaped a tentative policy of such deferential courtesy as he would have tendered a new acquaintance. He fancied that she would appreciate a manner which neither bordered on intimacy nor presumed upon the past.

But as the days went on a variance developed between the excellence of his plan in theory and in practical application. For one thing, Marian herself seemed less grateful in her acceptance of it than he had anticipated. He sometimes felt, from a subtle hint of her manner, that her confidence in her own adroitness and _savoir faire_ needed no such assistance from him.

There were moments, too, between their casual conversations when a wistful sort of weariness brought a droop to her lips, as though she would have welcomed a less constrained companionship.

Sometimes when off guard, he found himself slipping into the manner which seemed more natural, and then he wondered if his policy of aloofness might not savor of the priggish.

Not until they were nearing Honolulu did they refer to the past and then it was Marian and not Stuart who broached the subject.

"We were fortunate in being in Japan in cherry-blossom time," suggested Stuart in a matter of fact fashion, as they strolled on deck at sunset.

"We saw it all at its best."

"Cherry-blossom time in Japan--" she echoed musingly. Then suddenly she broke out with an almost impassioned bitterness, "Yes, I suppose we were--fortunate! We are both still in our twenties. I am rich and you are better than that--you are along the way of being famous. And yet it occurs to me that neither of us is precisely happy. We are both outcasts from contentment--just Bedouins in the world's desert, after all."

His question came vaguely and uncomfortably, "What do you mean, Marian?"

She laughed, banishing the gravity from her face.

"Nothing--nothing at all, Stuart," she assured him. "It was just a woman's mood." But after a moment she went on in a voice of greater seriousness: "It seems as good a time as any to tell you that I've come to realize with a wretched guiltiness--how I pulled you into the mess I made of my own affairs. If there were any way of undoing it--"

He interrupted her quickly, "Please don't brood over that, Marian. It's all ended now. You were too confused just then by your own foreground wretchedness to be able to gauge the perspectives."

"One has a right," she declared with self-scorn, "to expect from an adult human being, a reasonable degree of intelligence. I didn't display it to any conspicuous extent."

"You gave way to a moment of panic."

"Yes--and you suffered for it. I didn't quite understand then that sealing the evidence in the divorce, while it was supposed to protect me, really left you no chance to clear yourself."

"Naturally not," he smilingly rejoined. "You weren't a lawyer, you know.

But it must pain you to discuss these things and I'm not asking any explanation. Why shouldn't we let them rest in peace?"

Her face flushed a little and she seemed on the point of argument, but she only said: "Yes, I suppose that is better."