Gregory acknowledged the introduction and spent the next few minutes searching for and arranging their chairs.
“I suppose I have been outrageously lazy,” he confessed, when at last he had installed them. “That trip of mine into the interior, which you heard me speaking of with your uncle, was rather an exhausting affair.”
“Some day you must tell me the whole story,” she begged. “The snatches I heard of it were most romantic. You came back in Wu Ling’s trading schooner, didn’t you?”
“Wu Ling,” Gregory confided, “saved my life, and brought me back to the city. I got into trouble. I was certainly somewhere where I had no right to be, and I was handed over to Wu Abst, the famous pirate, by a couple of fanatical priests, with instructions that I was to become nourishment for the alligators. Wu Ling heard about it at one of the villages where he was trading and released me. It sounds like a page from somebody’s novel, doesn’t it? It was all very real at the time, though.”
They both looked at him curiously, but the older woman had lived for some time in a country where few questions were asked, and Claire was more concerned with the shadow of either pain or sleeplessness which seemed to darken his face.
“I can quite understand your feeling like a rest,” she said sympathetically. “I thought you looked terribly ill the day we met in the warehouse.”
She picked up a book, merely with the idea of giving him an opportunity to pass on if he cared to, but after strolling about the deck aimlessly for a quarter of an hour, he returned to find her with her book still unopened, her mind, as a matter of fact, occupied with him and his story. She accepted immediately his invitation to walk. They went on to the upper deck and looked down together at the oily water with its streak of phosphorescence. They talked of the ship, of such of their fellow passengers as they had observed, and of the route home, with a certain obvious attempt at casualness; conversation of little import, yet almost a necessary stepping-stone to more intimate understanding. Claire’s perceptions were keen enough for her to realise that this young man was scarcely in a normal condition.
“You have had no wireless from your uncle or from the firm since you left?” he asked, a little abruptly.
She shook her head.
“You asked me that before,” she reminded him. “Why on earth should I? We said good-by early in the morning after the night you dined with us. Uncle would never dream of coming to see me off. He hates steamers and he hates what he calls ‘looking westwards.’ How he will survive life in England I am sure I can’t imagine, except that he does sometimes still admit that English country life is wonderful.”