The nose in question was undoubtedly not adventurous in shape; it did not thrust itself far forward into other people’s affairs; and the eyes above, wide apart, deep-set, and narrowed for closer observation, were of a guarded twilight gray which gave the nose no encouragement whatever. “Nobody worth bothering about—_as usual_,” he grumbled. For the day was so lovely, the harbour of Algiers so glittering with light and heat, his own mood so full of holiday enterprise—it was his first vacation after a good many months on a hard exhausting job—that he could hardly believe he really looked to the rest of the world as he had seen himself that morning: a critical cautious man of forty-six, whom nobody could possibly associate with the romantic or the unexpected. “Usual luck; best I can hope for is to keep my cabin to myself for the rest of the cruise,” he pondered philosophically, hugging himself at the prospect of another fortnight of sea-solitude before—well, before the fateful uncertainty of what awaited him just beyond the voyage.... “And I haven’t even _seen_ her for five years!” he reflected, with that feeling of hollowness about the belt which prolonged apprehension gives. Passengers were still climbing the ship’s side, and he leaned and looked again, this time with contracted eyes and a slight widening of his cautious nostrils. His attention had been drawn to a young woman—a slip of a girl, rather—with a round flushed baby on her shoulder, a baby much too heavy for her slender frame, but on whose sleepy countenance her own was bent with a gaze of solicitude which wrung a murmur of admiration from Boyne. “Jove—if a fellow was younger!” Men of forty-six do not gasp as frequently at the sight of a charming face as they did at twenty; but when the sight strikes them it hits harder. Boyne had not been looking for pretty faces but for interesting ones, and it rather disturbed him to be put off his quest by anything so out of his present way as excessive youth and a rather pathetic grace. “Lord—the child’s ever so much too heavy for her. Must have been married out of the nursery: damned cad, not to—” The young face mounting toward him continued to bend over the baby, the girl’s frail shoulders to droop increasingly under their burden, as the congestion ahead of her forced the young lady to maintain her slanting position halfway up the liner’s flank. A nurse in correct bonnet and veil touched her shoulder, as if offering to relieve her; but she only tightened her arm about the child. Whereupon the nurse, bending, lifted in her own arms a carrot-headed little girl of four or five in a gaudy gipsy-like frock. “What—another? Why, it’s barbarous; it ought to be against the law! The poor little thing—” Here Boyne’s attention was distracted by the passage of a deck-steward asking where he wished his chair placed. He turned to attend to this matter, and saw, on the chair next to his, a tag bearing the name: “Mrs. Cliffe Wheater.”