of his attention to duty when the call came.

As for the Honorable Percival, he had ample opportunity during his long
hours of solitary confinement to make a complete inventory of his varied
emotions. Two things which should never be interrupted are a sneeze and
a proposal. That second declaration, so ardently begun and so ruthlessly
arrested, still hung in mid-air, and lying on his back in his darkened
stateroom, he had ample time in which to survey it from every angle.

Never for a moment did he question the undying nature of his affection
for Bobby. His emotion was too insistent and too consuming to be
doubted. It was the proprieties that he questioned, and they all shook
emphatic and disapproving heads. The proprieties in Grosvenor Square, to
be sure, loomed rather dim through the distance; but that immediate
propriety in Hong-Kong, toward whom he was speeding with every turn of
the screw, towered ominously.

If only he could hold things in abeyance until after the _Saluria_
sailed from Hong-Kong, all might be well. It was of the utmost
importance that he should not present Bobby to Sister Cordelia until the
die was irrevocably cast. Faults that in Miss Boynton of the Big Gully
Ranch would be glaring iniquities would, in the wife of the Honorable
Percival Hascombe, dwindle away to charming eccentricities.

A daring plan occurred to him. With proper strategy he might go down
to see the steamer off, get left on board, have the return trip in
uninterrupted bliss with Bobby, then boldly cable from America that
he had met his fate and succumbed to it, and that remonstrances were
useless. The scheme appealed to him the more he considered it.
Cablegrams were necessarily unemotional, and by the time letters were
exchanged, the proprieties would probably have decided to accept the
will of Providence and try to make the best of dear Percy's strange
choice of an unknown American girl.

In the meanwhile he would devote all his energies to fitting her for
the honor about to be conferred upon her, For he had quite given up the
idea of the "blossomed bower in dark purple spheres of sea," and had
definitely decided to take her back to England as the future mistress of
Hascombe Hall. All he asked was six months in which to cut and polish
his priceless gem.

It was not until the evening before the _Saluria_ was due in
Hong-Kong that the sea got over its fit of temper and decided to make
that last night the most beautiful one o