"I was wondering, Stuart," said Marian Holbury slowly, "whether you meant to speak to me at all."
"I didn't know you were on this side of the world," he responded with recovered equanimity.
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 naïvely responded: "Yes—except that in a foreign town we would be apt to meet the same people."