“Oh, quite,” agreed Staff. “Good night.”
His tone arrested Arkroyd’s attention; the man turned to watch his back as Staff shouldered down the alleyway toward the smoking-room. “I say!” commented Mr. Arkroyd, privately. “A bit hipped—what? No necessity for being so bally short with a chap....”
The guess was only too well founded: Staff was distinctly disgruntled. Within the past ten minutes his susceptibilities had been deeply wounded. Why Alison should have chosen to slight him so cavalierly when in transit through London passed his comprehension.... And the encounter with Arkroyd comforted him to no degree whatever. He had never liked Arkroyd, holding him, for all his wealth, little better than a theatre-loafer of the Broadway type; and now he remembered hearing, once or twice, that the man’s attentions to Alison Landis had been rather emphatic.
Swayed by whim, he chose to avoid the smoking-room, after all—having little wish to be annoyed by the chatter of Mr. Iff—and swung out on deck again for a half-hour of cigarettes and lonely brooding....
But his half-hour lengthened indefinitely while he sat, preoccupied, in the deck-chair of some total stranger. By definite stages, to which he was almost altogether oblivious, the Autocratic weighed anchor, shook off her tender and swung away on the seven-day stretch. As definitely her decks became bare of passengers. Presently Staff was quite a solitary figure in the long array of chairs.
Two bells rang mellowly through the ship before he roused, lifted himself to his feet and prepared to turn in, still distressed and wondering—so much so that he was barely conscious of the fact that one of the officers of the vessel was coming aft, and only noticed the man when he paused and spoke.
“I say—this is Mr. Staff, isn’t it?”
Staff turned quickly, searching his memory for the name and status of the sturdy and good-looking young Englishman.
“Yes,” he said slowly, “but—”
“I’m Mr. Manvers, the purser. If I’m not mistaken, you crossed with us this spring?”