own all that you have
said?"

She turned her head towards him. The trouble and brooding melancholy
seemed to have fallen from his face. She realised more fully its
sensitive lines, its poetic, almost passionate charm. She was carried
suddenly away upon a wave of the emotion which she herself had created.

"Oh, but you know!" she faltered. "You see, I trust you even to know
when ... Now your arm, please, until we reach the smoking room, and
mind--I must have coffee."

CHAPTER IX

Philip Romilly, on the last day of the voyage, experienced to the full
that peculiar sensation of unrest which seems inevitably to prevail when
an oceangoing steamer is being slowly towed into port. The winds of the
ocean had been left behind. There was a new but pleasant chill in the
frosty, sunlit air. The great buildings of New York, at which he had
been gazing for hours, were standing, heterogeneous but magnificent,
clear-cut against an azure sky. The ferry boats, with their amazing human
cargo, seemed to be screeching a welcome as they churned their way across
the busy river. Wherever he looked, there was something novel and
interesting, yet nothing sufficiently arresting to enable him to forget
that he was face to face now with the first crisis of his new life. Since
that brief wireless message on the first day out, there had been nothing
disquieting in the daily bulletins of news, and he had been able to
appreciate to the full the soothing sense of detachment, the friendliness
of his fellow voyagers, immeasurably above all the daily association with
Elizabeth. He felt like one awaking from a dream as he realised that
these things were over. At the first sight of land, it was as though a
magician's wand had been waved, a charm broken. His fellow passengers, in
unfamiliar costumes, were standing about with their eyes glued upon the
distant docks. A queer sense of ostracism possessed him. Perhaps, after
all, it had been a dream from which he was now slowly awaking.

He wandered into the lounge to find Elizabeth surrounded by a little
group of journalists. She nodded to him pleasantly and waved a great
bunch of long-stemmed pink roses which one of them had brought to her.
Her greeting saved him from despair. She, at least, was unchanged.

"See how my friends are beginning to spoil me!" she cried out. "Really, I
can't tell any of you a thing more," she went on, turning back to them,
"only this, and I am sure it ought to be interestin