addled away aft, Rudolph turned upon her a
face of tragedy.

"Was that true?" he demanded grimly.

"Was what true?" she asked, with baby eyes of wonder, which no longer
deceived, but angered.

"What the doctor said." Rudolph's voice trembled. "The tittle--the title
he gave you."

"Why, of course," she laughed.

"And you did not tell me!" he began, with scorn.

"Don't be foolish," she cut in. From beneath her skirt the toe of a
small white shoe tapped the deck angrily. Of a sudden she laughed, and
raised a tantalizing face, merry, candid, and inscrutable. "Why, you
never asked me, and--and of course I thought you were saying it all
along. You have such a dear, funny way of pronouncing, you know."

He hesitated, almost believing; then, with a desperate gesture, wheeled
and marched resolutely aft. That night it was no Prussian snores which
kept him awake and wretched. "Everything is finished," he thought
abysmally. He lay overthrown, aching, crushed, as though pinned under
the fallen walls of his youth.

At breakfast-time, the ship lay still beside a quay where mad crowds of
brown and yellow men, scarfed, swathed, and turbaned in riotous colors,
worked quarreling with harsh cries, in unspeakable interweaving uproar.
The air, hot and steamy, smelled of strange earth. As Rudolph followed a
Malay porter toward the gang-plank, he was painfully aware that Mrs.
Forrester had turned from the rail and stood waiting in his path.

"Without saying good-by?" she reproached him. The injured wonder in her
eyes he thought a little overdone.

"Good-by." He could not halt, but, raising his cap stiffly, managed to
add, "A pleasant voyage," and passed on, feeling as though she had
murdered something.

He found himself jogging in a rickshaw, while equatorial rain beat like
down-pouring bullets on the tarpaulin hood, and sluiced the Chinaman's
oily yellow back. Over the heavy-muscled shoulders he caught glimpses of
sullen green foliage, ponderous and drooping; of half-naked barbarians
that squatted in the shallow caverns of shops; innumerable faces, black,
yellow, white, and brown, whirling past, beneath other tarpaulin hoods,
or at carriage windows, or shielded by enormous dripping wicker hats, or
bared to the pelting rain. Curious odors greeted him, as of sour
vegetables and of unknown rank substances burning. He stared like a
visionary at the streaming multitude of alien shapes.

The coolie swerved, stopped, tilted his shafts