"Why I speak in this way," she explained, "is that since I ran away from Hong Kong——"
"Oh, you ran away from Hong Kong!"
"Of course!" She said it in a way that indicated a certain lack of understanding on his part. "Since I ran away from Hong Kong I have been looking, looking for such—for such a man as you appear to be, to—to confide in."
"Don't you suppose a woman would do almost as well?" spoke Peter, who, through experience, had grown to dislike the father-confessor role.
"If you don't care to listen——" she began, as though he had hurt her.
"I am all ears," stated Peter, with his most convincing smile.
"And I have changed my mind," said Romola Borria with a disdainful toss of her pretty head. "Besides, I think the Herr Captain would have a word with you."
The fat and happy captain of the Persian Gulf occupied the breadth if not the height of the doorway, wearing his boyish grin, and Peter hastened to his side with a murmured apology to the girl as he left her.
He merely desired to have transmitted an unimportant clearance message to the Batavia office, to state that all was well and that the thrust-bearing, repaired, was now performing "smoot'ly."
Dropping the hard rubber head-phones over his ears, Peter listened to the air, and in a moment the silver crash of the white spark came from the doorway.