She smiled, and came back to earth. “Oh, if you MUST know, to India, by the east coast, changing steamers at Aden.”
“Extraordinary!” I cried. “Do you know, Hilda, as luck will have it, I also shall be on my way to Bombay by the very same steamer!”
“But you don't know what steamer it is?”
“No matter. That only makes the coincidence all the odder. Whatever the name of the ship may be, when you get on board, I have a presentiment that you will be surprised to find me there.”
She looked up at me with a gathering film in her eyes. “Hubert, you are irrepressible!”
“I am, my dear child; so you may as well spare yourself the needless trouble of trying to repress me.”
If you rub a piece of iron on a loadstone, it becomes magnetic. So, I think, I must have begun to acquire some part of Hilda's own prophetic strain; for, sure enough, a few weeks later, we both of us found ourselves on the German East African steamer Kaiser Wilhelm, on our way to Aden—exactly as I had predicted. Which goes to prove that there is really something after all in presentiments!
“Since you persist in accompanying me,” Hilda said to me, as we sat in our chairs on deck the first evening out, “I see what I must do. I must invent some plausible and ostensible reason for our travelling together.”
“We are not travelling together,” I answered. “We are travelling by the same steamer; that is all—exactly like the rest of our fellow-passengers. I decline to be dragged into this imaginary partnership.”
“Now do be serious, Hubert! I am going to invent an object in life for us.”