She walked the long sweep of the promenade deck and sat for a while in her steamer chair, next Jim's, where, for a few beautiful hours on the evening before, Jim had sat with her. She read a little from a frothy novel that fell short of the realities of love as she knew it, and failed to touch on that great reality which still so heavily oppressed her; and she watched the long, oily swell of the now green waters, beating to crests of foam, here and there, and forming an horizon-line for all the world like distant mountain-peaks seen, as Stainton had so often seen such peaks, from a peak that is higher than them all. She went to look after Jim every quarter of an hour, but, just before the band began to play on deck and the deck-stewards came smilingly about with their trays of bouillon and sandwiches, she found him sleeping and resolved not again to disturb him. She knew that she was very lonely, but she lunched on herring salad, clam chowder, farced turkey-wings, oysterplant menagere, succotash, biscuit japonais and nougat parfait. She had finished and was sitting idly at her table watching the awkward motions with which a line of otherwise commonplace passengers walked by on their way upstairs, when her notice was caught by a man whose gait had all the certainty of a traveller upon a level road. He was tall and slender, with a figure altogether built for grace and agility; but what especially impressed her was his air of abounding youth. His face was, in fact, that of a mere boy--a boy not five years her senior. It was a perfect oval, that face, flushed with health and alight with freshness. Even the fiercely waxed little blond moustache above its full red lips failed to give it either age or experience, and the clear eyes, intensely blue, looked on all they met with the frank curiosity of the young that are in love with life. They met Muriel's own interested scrutiny and, when they answered it with an honest smile, whipped a sudden blush into her pale cheeks. Muriel hastened from the saloon. She went to look after Jim; but Jim still slept. She went on deck again. She knew that the blond young man would be there, though how she knew it she could not guess, and yet she argued that there was no reason why his presence should banish her from the free air. She sat down. She saw him coming past, on a walk about the deck, and looked away. The second time he passed she glanced at him, and he smiled and raised his steamer cap. A gust of wind fluttered her rug, and he stooped to rearrange it. "Thank you," stammered Muriel. "It's not necessary, really. The steward----" The young man bowed. It was a bow that, in New York, would have struck her as absurdly elaborate; here she liked it. "But it is, I assure you, a pleasure," he protested. He spoke English without an accent, but with a precision that, for all its ease, betrayed a Teutonic parentage and education. "Thank you," repeated Muriel, and she blushed again.