She leaned against the rail and, while the breeze whipped the sash of her sweater and her white skirt about her, studied him gravely until he said: "Meeting you here was such a coincidence that it astonished me ... don't you find it surprising, too?" She shook her head. "No," she said, "I don't. You see I _did_ know that you were on this side of the globe. I even knew that you would be on board. Lieutenant Hancock told me." CHAPTER XVI Stuart Farquaharson's first impulse upon finding his surprise for the meeting unshared, was an astonishment at Marian herself. Unless some great urgency existed for an immediate return to the States he supposed that she would have avoided sailing with him. "The circumstance that the one man I knew in Yokohama should also be an acquaintance of yours only heightens the effect of the coincidence," he hazarded, and his companion smiled as though amused at some unimpaired element of humor as she naively responded: "Yes--except that in a foreign town we would be apt to meet the same people." However it had happened, thought Stuart, it was a deplorable accident: their being thrown together for ten days in the narrowed companionship of a sea-voyage. For her, even more than himself, it must bring back the painful notoriety of their last companionship. It had all been so bootless and uncalled for! Marian Holbury might have divorced her husband had she wished, and remained unstigmatized. Yet she had, by yielding to an ungoverned impulse, reversed their positions of justification. Now the news of their names on the same sailing lists would come to ears at home and set tongues wagging afresh. There had been enough of that. As she stood there regarding him quietly, with the thorough self-possession of her sex and her class, he reminded himself that there was no profit in a sulkiness of attitude. "What are your sentiments," he inquired, "regarding a cup of tea?" And she laughed frankly and easily as she responded: "They are of the friendliest." Together they turned and went toward the nearest white-jacketed deck steward. As he made a pretense of sipping his tea Farquaharson admitted to himself that the lady whom he was meeting after a long interval had lost nothing of her charm. The ten days of enforced companionship would at all events be relieved of tedium, but he was in a quandary as to what should be his attitude. Later in the seclusion of the smoking-room he shaped a tentative policy of such deferential courtesy as he would have tendered a new acquaintance. He fancied that she would appreciate a manner which neither bordered on intimacy nor presumed upon the past.