“Have my things come up yet?” The maid responded affirmatively. “Good! I’m dead, almost....”
She turned back to Staff, offering him her hand and with it, bewitchingly, her eyes: “Dear boy! Good night.”
He bent low over the hand to hide his dissatisfaction: he felt a bit old to be treated like a petulant, teasing child....
“Good night,” he said stiffly.
“What a bear you are, Staff! Can’t you wait till tomorrow? At all events, you must....”
Laughing, she swept away, following her maid up the companion stairs. Staff pursued her with eyes frowning and perplexed, and more leisurely with his person.
As he turned aft on the upper deck, meaning to go to the smoking-room for a good-night cigarette—absorbed in thought and paying no attention to his surroundings—a voice saluted him with a languid, exasperating drawl: “Ah, Staff! How-d’-ye-do?”
He looked up, recognising a distant acquaintance: a man of medium height with a tendency toward stoutness and a taste for extremes in the matter of clothes; with dark, keen eyes deep-set in a face somewhat too pale, a close-clipped grey moustache and a high and narrow forehead too frankly betrayed by the derby he wore well back on his head.
Staff nodded none too cordially. “Oh, good evening, Arkroyd. Just come aboard?”
Arkroyd, on the point of entering his stateroom, paused long enough to confirm this surmise. “Beastly trip—most tiresome,” he added, frankly yawning. “Don’t know how I should have stood it if it hadn’t been for Miss Landis. You know her, I believe? Charming girl—charming.”