"And thanks for returning the book."
This was the beginning of what may be written down as one of the most amazing situations ever devised by Fate. The woman behind those amber spectacles was young, and it was the youth of her that drew Mathison, though he was utterly unconscious of this fact—drew him morning after morning as the magnetic pole draws the needle of the compass.
By the time the ship reached Honolulu and went on his depression was a thing of memory; his nerves became normal; he was more alive than he had been in years. With all the cunning of her superb art she made her lure one of motherhood, so irresistible that he no longer bothered his head over her avoidance of sunlight or the fact that if he saw her at night it was by the port rail, her back to the moonshine. There was one clear thought regarding her: what a comrade she must have been to the man she once called husband! Whimsical, deeply learned, sound in philosophy, humorous, and unafraid: she made him think of his mother; and all the tenderness he had bottled up in his lonely heart these fourteen years went out to her. Lightly he fell into the habit of calling her Mother, and in her turn she called him Boy.
For all the pleasure and satisfaction he found in this companionship, there was a line and he never crossed it. Of his own affairs he was remarkably reserved. Several times—merely as a test—she laid traps for him, but each time he evaded them. Morgan—to whom she had gone sensibly with a frank confession—had summed up this odd handsome young man: "He is likely to fool you. Under that amiable exterior there is a lot of blood and iron stuff. Always keep that in mind. Just now he is in a bad shape. Get him out of it. He's a bit of a mollycoddle where women are concerned, but among men he is an ace."
Had Mathison been of her world—a world to which she was returning gladly, though she had left it indifferently enough—he would soon have seen through her art, clever and vigilant as it was. She could not disguise the slender youthfulness of her foot. No hand sixty-odd years old could be so firmly fleshed. The gray glove hid nothing. But his guilelessness served to carry her over a rather shaky bridge.
On the third night out of Honolulu—it was near eleven—Mathison stood in the little shelter between one of the life-boats and the rail, whence he could look down into the waist, at the recumbent forms of the steerage passengers who were sleeping on deck. Night after night he had watched from this lookout; but moonlight and starlight had a way of dissolving and blotting out salients.
To-night, however, his persistence was rewarded. From the black rectangle of the companion door a Chinese woman, apparently of high caste, stepped forth. She stood poised for a moment, then trotted across to starboard and laid her arms on the broad teak rail. She wore a radiant jacket, full of gold thread which caught the moonshine and threw it back—a spider-web hung with dew. She was smoking a cigarette.
He knew China; and suddenly he sensed something wrong, and discovered the flaw. No Chinese woman, high or low, ever wore such a thing on her head. Mathison couldn't have named it; but a white woman would have had no difficulty. It was a dainty boudoir cap.