Stuart's return from Tokyo and Nikko put him in Yokohama just before his steamer's sailing time. So it happened that he went over the gang plank of the Nippon Maru as the whistle was warning visitors ashore.
Having no acquaintances among the figures that lined the deck rail behind a flutter of handkerchiefs, he went to the smoking-lounge where for two hours he busied himself with his author's routine of note books.
It was mid-afternoon when he emerged among those fellow passengers who had long ago claimed their steamer chairs and dedicated themselves to the idleness of the voyage.
Stuart began pacing the boat deck with the adequate companionship of his pipe. He was not lonely for the society of men and women. In his own mind he put a stress of emphasis on women. Two of them had touched his life closely enough to alter its currents. One, he had lost through his own folly and her inability to free herself from the sectionalism of an inherited code. The other had been foolish in the extreme and had drawn him into the whirlpool of her heedlessness.
In ways as far apart as east and west, each had been fascinating and each had been beautiful.
The orbit of his rounds carried him several times past a woman, who was standing unaccompanied at the rail astern. Her face and glance were turned outward where the propellers were churning up a lather of white spume and where little eddies of jade and lapis-lazuli raced among the bubbles.
He felt, at first, no curiosity for the averted face, but finally the length of time she had been standing there without change of posture, the unusual slenderness and grace of the figure, and the fact that he had not seen her features awakened a tepid interest.
But when, for the seventh time, he rounded the white walls of the after cabin and she turned with a smile of seeming welcome on her lips, Farquaharson stopped dead. For just a surprised instant he forgot the requirements of courtesy and glanced about as if instinctively seeking escape. His jaw stiffened, then with a sense of chagrin for this gracelessness he stepped forward with a belated cordiality.
But in the brief interval he saw the exquisitely fair coloring of the woman's cheeks flush pinker, and the lower lip catch between her teeth.
Her eyes, which in the afternoon sun were golden amber, clouded with a swift shadow of pain which as swiftly vanished.