Both were privately busy for a moment with the circumstances of their one previous meeting. Things, she shrewdly decided, must have been happening to him. As for Elsa, she looked precisely the same as ever. She was still unmarried, and had just begun a little to take on the vigorous air of one who is on the verge of becoming really confirmed in her attitude toward life.
“It’s very surprising we should have run into each other like this, ’way out here,” she said, taking off her rather mannish hat and thrusting back her hair with a firm brown hand.
“Yes, it is,” he agreed, feeling more at his ease. When they met before she had really quite terrified him with her bold, sure, satirical front. Now he was much better equipped to combat it. He felt he was equipped to combat anything. “But where have you ever come from suddenly,” he asked, “riding a bicycle so coolly out of nowhere at all?”
“I’m on a trip with dad,” she told him. “We brought Aunt Flora as far as Manila and dropped her there. But I’m going to stand by the ship all the way back to San Francisco again.” There was a hidden smile in her words which seemed to exult in a certain stability of will not shared by the romantic Aunt Flora. “I like it for a change,” she went on with a slight drawl. “I never dreamed in the first place the Captain would let me come.” And she laughed briefly. “He’s always such an old bear about business. But there wasn’t any difficulty. It only goes to prove,” she ended, shrugging humorously, “that you never can tell about the Captain until you try. I’m having a bully time, though the days at sea are usually pretty dull. As soon as it’s possible to establish shore connections anywhere, I make off at once with my bicycle.”
“I’ve met your father—Captain Utterbourne,” said Jerome.
“Have you? Yes—I don’t know why—I assumed you knew him. Dad seems to meet everybody sooner or later. He’s absurdly promiscuous—not meaning anything personal,” she laughed, without really qualifying her easy tactlessness. “And yet,” she added, in a drawl not so very unlike her parent’s, though it seemed a few shades brighter, “dad’s not what I’d call the mixing kind.”
Jerome was silent, and in a moment she went on, drooping her eyes and smiling calmly: “But it hasn’t been explained what you’re doing in Borneo.”
“I’m afraid I’m stranded here,” he smiled.
She gazed at him blankly.
And then, before going deeper into his plight, he asked: “But how did you get in without any one’s seeing you? I don’t understand, for I swear I know every ship in the harbour by this time, and the Star of Troy certainly wasn’t hereabouts this morning.”