To which Howard responded by telling him to go to thunder. "Trouble with Miss Childs," he said, "is that the fellows are standing in a queue up to her father's door-steps, waiting to get a chance at her."
"Why did you step out of line?"
"I'll tell you the kind of a girl she is," Howard said, ignoring the question. "Of course, a man never would get stuck with Laura at a dance, but she's the kind, if she thought he was stuck, would make some sort of excuse—say she wanted to speak to her mother—so as to shake him. No man ever wants to get clear of Laura, but she's that kind of girl. That's why men hang round so."
"You evidently didn't hang round?"
Howard yawned. "Did I show you the pearl I found yesterday?" he asked, and produced, after much rummaging in his various pockets, a twist of paper. Leighton inspected the pearl without enthusiasm.
"Good so far as it goes. Hardly big enough for the ring."
Howard gave him a thrust in the ribs. "I'm going down to the cabin."
In his sweltering state-room he looked at his find, critically. "No, it isn't big enough," he decided. "Well, maybe I'll never have a chance to produce a ring," he added, dolefully; then he dropped the pearl into his collar-box, and mopped the perspiration from his frowning forehead. "Wonder if I shall ever be cool enough in this life to wear a collar?" he speculated. After all, why had he stepped out of the line? "I wish I'd prospected before I left home!" Yet he realized that he had not known how much Laura counted in his life until he got away from her. Out here, "digging for buried treasure" in the blazing sun, lying on deck through velvet, starlit nights, the recollection of that "queue" lining up at Billy-boy's front door-steps had become first an irritation, and by and by an uneasiness. He had had one card from her,—"7° above. Don't you wish you were as cold as we are?" The photograph on the back revealed a snowy mountain-side that was tantalizing to a man who had nothing to look at but blazing, palm-fringed reefs, and who, for weeks, had been sweating at 104°. And it was not only the temperature that tantalized him—in the foreground of the picture were half a dozen of his set on skis. Laura, in a sweater and a woolly white toque, was putting a mittened hand into Jack McKnight's, to steady herself. Howard had not liked that card. "McKnight's got on his Montreal rig, all right," he thought, contemptuously; "he always dresses for the part!"
It was that postal which had aroused his uneasiness about the queue, and set him to counting the weeks until he could get into the line again. Also, it made him write rather promptly to Frederica Payton:
"Hasn't Jack McKnight got any job? He's a pretty successful loafer if he can go off skiing all around the clock. Why doesn't Laura put an extinguisher on him? How is Laura? I suppose she and Jack are having the time of their young lives this winter."