I never knew how he meant to continue, for a shuffling and pawing outside the door warned us that Drinkwater, having finished his breakfast, was feeling his way in. The doctor spoke as the boy pushed the door open and stumbled across the threshold. "Morning, Harry! Your friend here seems to have waked up in pretty good condition. Look at the breakfast he’s been making away with." He rose to leave, since the cabin had not room enough for two men on foot at the same time. "See you on deck by and by," he added, with a nod to me; "then we can have a more satisfactory talk." I waited till he was out of earshot. "Who is he, anyhow?" In giving me a summary of Averill’s history Drinkwater couldn’t help weaving in a partial one of his own. It was in fact most of his own, except that it included no reference to his birth and parentage. Drinkwater had worked his way through one of the great universities, when laboratory research threw him in contact with Boyd Averill. The latter was not a practising physician, but a student of biology. He was the more at liberty to follow one of the less lucrative lines of scientific work because of being a man of large means. Sketching the origin of this fortune, my companion informed me that from his patron’s democratic ways no one would ever suppose him the only son, and except for a sister the only heir, of the biggest banker in the state of New Jersey. By one of those odd freaks of heredity which neither Sir Francis Galton nor the great Plockendorff had been able to explain, Boyd Averill had shown a distaste for banking from his cradle, and yet with an interest equally difficult to account for in bacteria. On the subject of Averill’s more personal life all my friend could tell me was that he had married Miss Lulu Winfield, once well known on the concert stage. "And, say," he went on, enthusiastically, "she’s about the prettiest. You’ll see for yourself when you come up on deck. She’ll speak to you. Oh yes, she will," he hastened to assure me, when I began to demur. "She won’t mind. She’s not a bit aristocratic, and Miss Blair says the same." To make conversation I asked him who was Miss Blair, learning that she was the young lady whom Miss Averill had brought over to Europe to act as stenographer to her brother when Drinkwater had gone to the war. "You see," he continued to explain, "Averill’s been white with me from the start. When I left him in the lurch—after he’d paid my expenses over to Europe and all that—because the war broke out, he didn’t kick any more than a straw dummy. When I told him I felt mean, but that this war couldn’t be going on and me not in it, he said that at my age he’d have felt the same. One of these days I’ve got to pay him back that fare. I’ll do that when I’ve got to work in New York and saved a bit of dough." I asked him what he meant to work at.