“ ‘What sort of a fellow is he?’ asked Jack quietly, and then he went on, which saved me the trouble of a reply: ‘She hasn’t seen him for four years. They got engaged before he left England, and now she’s going out to marry him.’
“ ‘I see,’ I murmured non-committally, and shortly afterwards I made my excuse and left him.
“I didn’t turn in at once when I got to my cabin, I wanted to try and get things sorted out in my mind. The first point, which was as obvious as the electric light over the bunk, was that if Jack Manderby was not in love with Molly Felsted he was as near to it as made no odds. The second and far more important point was one on which I was in the dark—was the girl in love with him? If so, it simplified matters considerably; but if not, if she was only playing the fool, there was going to be trouble when we got to Burma. And the trouble would take the form of Rupert Morrison. For the more I thought of it the more amazed did I become that such a girl could ever have become engaged to such a man.
“Of course, four years is a long time, especially when they are passed in comparative solitude. I had no idea what sort of fellow Morrison had been when first he arrived in the country, but I had a very shrewd idea what manner of man he was now. Perhaps it had been the loneliness—loneliness takes some men worse than others—but, whatever the cause, Morrison, after four years in Burma, was no fit mate for such a girl as Molly Felsted. A brooding, sullen man, given to fierce fits of almost animal rage, a heavy drinker of the type who is never drunk, and——”
The Ordinary Man paused and shrugged his shoulders.
“Well, it’s unfair to mention the last point. After all, most of us did that without thinking; but the actual arrival of an English girl—a wife—who was to step, blindly ignorant, into her predecessor’s shoes, so to speak, made one pause to think. Anyway, that was neither here nor there. What frightened me was the prospect of the girl marrying the Morrison of her imagination and discovering, too late, the Morrison of reality. When that happened, with Jack Manderby not five miles away, the fat was going to be in the fire with a vengeance.
“It was after Colombo that matters came to a head. We left the P. & O. there, and got into another boat going direct to Rangoon. The weather was glorious—hot as blazes by day, and just right at night. And it was after dinner one evening a couple of days before we were due in, that quite inadvertently I butted into the pair of them in a secluded spot on deck. His arms were round her, and they both sounded a bit incoherent. Of course, there was no use pretending I hadn’t seen—they both looked up at me. I could only mutter my apology and withdraw. But I determined, even at the risk of being told to go to hell, to have a word with young Jack that night.
“ ‘Look here, old man,’ I said to him a bit later, ‘you’ve got a perfect right to request me to mind my own business, but I’m going to risk that. I saw you two to-night, kissing to beat the band—confound it all, there wasn’t a dog’s earthly of not seeing you—and what I want to know is where Morrison comes in, or if he’s gone out?’
“He looked at me a bit shamefacedly, then he lit a cigarette.
“ ‘Hugh,’ he said, with a twisted sort of smile, ‘I just worship the ground that girl walks on.’