Those embarrassments had grown more entangling throughout the last days of the voyage. The very good-will of the people about me increased the complications in which I was finding myself involved. Every one asked a different set of questions, the answers I gave being not always compatible with each other. I didn't exactly lie; I only replied wildly—trying to guard my secret till I could walk off the boat and disappear from the ken of these kindly folk who did nothing but wish me well.
I accomplished this feat, I am bound to confess, with little credit; but credit was not my object. All I asked was the privilege of being alone, with leisure to take stock of my small assets and reckon up the possibilities before me. As it was incredible that a man such as I was could be lost on the threshold of his home I needed all the faculties that remained to me in order to think out the ways and means by which I could be found.
So alone I found myself, though not without resorting to ruses of which I was even then ashamed.
It was Miss Blair who scared me into them. Coming up to me on deck, during the last afternoon on board, she said, casually:
"Going to stay awhile in New York?"
It was a renewal of the everlasting catechism, so I said, curtly:
"I dare say."
"Oh, don't be huffy! Looking for a job?"
"Later, perhaps; not at once."
In her smile, as her eye caught mine, there was a visible significance. "You'll be a good kid, wont you? You'll—you'll keep on the level?"