on the other hand. Two, at least, of that reassembling
company deserved their appetites at breakfast. But Turnbull had no zest
for anything, and the women generally only feebly toyed with their
forks. The colonel had found time to seize Loring by the arm and
whisper to him on the stairs:

"By Jove, young man, you're playing a deep game! D'you expect to find
out anything?"

"I have--already," said Loring.

"The devil you have! What?"

"She's innocent--utterly!"

And that bright morning was followed by a cloudless afternoon and a
sweet, still, starlit evening, and by this time all men and all women
were on deck, and the Idaho was foaming swiftly on through the summer
seas, and people went below reluctantly at night, and woke to new and
brighter life on the morrow; and Loring was up with the sun and drinking
deep draughts of old ocean's ozone, as he paced the decks till Pancha
came. And one day followed another, and Turnbull read and yawned and
dozed and tried to talk to the charming senoritas, but couldn't muster
enough Castilian, and Traynor chalked the decks for "horse billiards"
and shuffleboard, and everybody took a hand at times, and one evening,
despite the havoc moist salt air plays with catgut, Pancha's guitar and
that of the purser were brought into requisition, and Pancha was made to
sing, a thing she didn't do too well as yet, and Pancha knew it without
asking when she looked in Loring's eyes, and no power or persuasion
could make her try again--until long, long after.

They were having now an ideal voyage, so far as wind and weather were
concerned, but the Senoritas de la Cruz declared it the stupidest they'd
ever known, and the officers--_los Americanos_--the least attentive or
attractive of those with whom they had ever sailed. And everybody seemed
to long for the sight of the green headlands of the Golden Gate and the
terraced slopes of San Francisco--all save two; Pancha, to whom the
ending of that voyage meant the ending of the sweetest days her life had
ever known, and the beginning of a school drudgery she dreaded, and
Loring, to whom the return to San Francisco meant the taking up anew of
a tangled case that had become hateful to him, to whom there was the
prospect of a meeting that he would gladly avoid, to whom there was
coming an inevitable parting, the thought of which oppressed him
strangely, and he could not yet tell why.

The marvelous green of the California bluffs spanned the horizon