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.
"Oh, there'll be things. There always are. Miss Blair wants me to learn the touch system and go in for big stenography. Says she'll teach me. Say, she's some girl. I want you to know her." He reverted to the principal theme. "Big money in piano-tuning, too, though what I'm really out for is biology. But after all what's biology but the science of life?—and you can pick that up anywhere. Oh, I'm all right. I've had the darnedest good luck, when I've seen my pals—" He left this sentence unfinished, going on to say: "That was the way when I got mine at Bois Robert. Shell came down—and, gee whizz! Nothing left of a bunch of six or eight of us but me—and I only got this."
A toss of his hand was meant to indicate his eyes, after which he went on to tell how marvelously he had been taken care of, with the additional good luck of running across Boyd Averill in hospital. Best luck of all was, now that he was able to go home, the Averills were coming, too, and had been willing to have him sail by their boat and keep an eye on him. He spoke as if they were his intimate friends, while I had only to appear on deck to have them become mine.
"In the jewelry business?" he asked me, suddenly.
I stared in an amazement of which he must have recognized the tones in my voice. "What made you ask me that?"
"Oh, I don't know. Speak like it. Thought you might have been in that—or gents' furnishings."