They gave me a shock.
They were so surprisingly out of keeping with the rest of his otherwise well-groomed and expensive appearance, for the nails were rough and worn; the fingers stumpy and battered and hard, the palms horny as those of a navvy.
The Honourable Jim saw my look.
"Yes! You think my own hands are no such beauties. Faith, you're right, child," he said, carelessly flicking the ash from his cigarette off against a flint. "I never could get my hands fit to be seen again after that time I came across as a stoker."
"A stoker?" I repeated, staring at the young man. "What on earth were you doing as a stoker?"
"Working my passage across home from Canada one time," he told me. "You know I was sent out to Canada by the old man with about five bob a week to keep up the old family traditions and found a new family fortune. Oh, quite so."
"What did you do?" I asked. One couldn't help being a little interested in the gyrations of this rolling stone that has acquired polish and nothing else.
"Do? Nothing. A bit of everything. Labourer, farm hand. On a ranch, finally," he said, "where they wouldn't give me anything to eat until I'd 'made good.' Yes, they were harder than you are, little black pigeon-girl that I thought had the heart of a stone under the soft black plumage of her. And by 'making good' they meant taking a horse—a chestnut, same coloured coat as your hair, child—that nobody else could ride. I had to stick on her for three hours, and I stuck on. I told myself I'd rather die than come off. And I didn't come off, nor yet did I die, as you may perceive," laughed the Honourable Jim, tossing the end of the cigarette over the cliff, above which the gulls were wheeling and calling in voices as shrill as those of the "Refuge" girls. "But they had to carry us both home—the horse and myself."
"Why carry you?"
"The pair of us were done," he said. "But it was a grand afternoon we had, Miss Lovelace, I can tell you. I wish you'd been there, child, looking on."