"Woman! what woman?"
"I don't know. I never saw her before. But while you were talking I saw a woman's face through the haze of tobacco smoke. She was standing near the door. It was a wonderful face—and her eyes were beyond description. Great, pure, yearning, loving eyes they were, and they lit up the face which might have been—the face of an angel."
"You were dreaming, my friend. I have seen every woman on board, and not one of them possesses a face worth looking at twice."
"I asked another man," admitted Dick, "and he told me I was dreaming. He had been sitting near the door, he assured me, and he had seen no woman, while the smoke-room steward was just as certain."
"Of course there was no woman."
"And yet I saw a woman, unless——" He stopped suddenly.
"Unless what, my friend?"
"Unless it was a kind of rebuke to my scepticism last night; unless it was the face of an angel."
"An angel in mid-ocean!" Romanoff laughed. "An angel in the smoke-room of a P. & O. steamer! Faversham, you are an example of your own arguments. Imagination can do anything."
"But it would be beautiful if it were so. Do you know, I'm only half a sceptic after all. I only half believe in what I said in the smoke-room last night."