Prale did not understand that. Why should the dragon be incensed with him? He was making no attempt to lay siege to the heart of Miss Kate Gilbert. He was no fortune hunter after an heiress. The expression on the face of the maid amused Prale even while he wondered what it could mean.
"Picked your hotel?" Kate Gilbert was asking.
"Not yet, but I hope to get in somewhere," Prale told her. "May I be of assistance to you when we land?"
"Marie will help me, thanks—and there will be others on the wharf," she answered.
A cold look had come into her face again, and she turned half away from him and looked down at the crowd on the wharf. Sidney Prale looked straight at her, despite the glare of the middle-aged maid. Kate Gilbert was a woman who would appeal to a majority of men, but there seemed to be something peculiar about her, Prale told himself. He knew that she had avoided him purposely during the voyage, and that she had spoken to him purposely now, yet had asked nothing except whether he had chosen a hotel.
Why should Kate Gilbert wish to know where he was going to stop? Perhaps it had been only an idle question, he explained to himself. In her happiness at getting home, she had merely wished to speak to somebody, and none of her shipboard friends happened to be near.
He turned from her and glanced at the maid again. She was not the sort to be named Marie, Prale told himself. Marie called up a vision of a petite, trim woman from sunny France, and this Marie was nothing of the sort. She appeared more to be a peasant used to hard labor, Prale decided.
And he could not understand the expression on the woman's face as she looked at him. It was almost one of loathing.
"Got me mixed up with somebody else, or somebody has been giving me a bad reputation," Prale mused. "Enough to make a man shiver—that look of hers."
Kate Gilbert, apparently, did not intend to have anything more to do with him. Smiling a little at her manner, Prale lifted his hat, picked up the suit case, and turned away. Once more he tried to force a passage through the jostling crowd. He had not taken three steps when Kate Gilbert touched him on the arm.