These were some of the thoughts still tumbling vaguely about his mind when the tug brought letters aboard at Queenstown, and on the dining-room table where they were spread out he found one for himself in a handwriting that he both welcomed and dreaded. CHAPTER III He welcomed it, because for years it had been the one remaining link with the life of his old home—these formal epistles that reached him at long intervals; and he dreaded it, because he knew it would contain a definite invitation of an embarrassing description. ‘She’s bound to ask me,’ he reflected as he opened it in his cabin; ‘she can’t help herself. And I am bound to accept, for I can’t help myself either.’ He was far too honest to think of inventing elaborate excuses. ‘I’ve got to go and spend a month with her right away whether I like it or not.’ It was not by any means that he disliked his sister, for indeed he hardly knew her; after all these years he barely remembered what she looked like, the slim girl of eighteen he had left behind. It was simply that in his mind she stood for the conventional life, so alien to his vision, to which he had returned. He would try to like her, certainly. Very warm impulses stirred in his heart as he thought of her—his only near relative in the world, and the widow of his old school and Cambridge friend, Dick Messenger. It was in her handwriting that he first learned of Dick’s love for her, as it was in hers that the news of his friend’s death reached him—after his long tour—two months old. The handwriting was a symbol of the deepest human emotions he had known. And for that reason, too, he dreaded it. He never realised quite what kind of woman she had become; in his thoughts she had always remained simply the girl of eighteen—grown up—married. Her letters had been very kind and gentle, if in the nature of the case more and more formal. She became shadowy and vague in his mind as the years passed, and more and more he had come to think of her as wholly out of his own world. Reading between the lines it was not difficult to see that she attached importance to much in life that seemed to him unreal and trivial, whereas the things that he thought vital she never referred to at all. It might, of course, be merely restraint concealing great depths. He could not tell. The letters, after a few years, had become like formal government reports. He had written fully, however, to announce his home-coming, and her reply had been full of genuine pleasure. ‘I don’t think she’ll make very much of me,’ was the thought in his mind whenever he dwelt upon it. ‘I’m afraid my world must seem foreign—unreal to her; the things I know rubbish.’ So, in the privacy of his cabin, his heart already strangely astir by the emotion of that blue line on the horizon, he read his sister’s invitation and found it charming. There was spontaneous affection in it.