He kissed her again on the side of the cheek, missing her lips somehow, and was gone. Helen hardly saw his spare figure in the topcoat that seemed too large for it, so quickly the crowd closed behind him. She was conscious of impatience with Foster, who stood there bowing in his sleek importance as the millionaire's confidential man, extending his dampish fingers for good-by. The party who had come to see her off sprinkled their final farewells with a few banal last remarks and disappeared. Miss Bleecker, serenely proud, took her station by the taffrail in a place where no acquaintance or reporter could fail to note her among the "well-known people sailing this morning." Helen was at last alone.
Alone as she had never felt before, in her five-and-twenty years of active, independent life. A gap in the double row of passengers crowding to the rail forward gave her an opportunity. Slipping in, she looked down upon upturned, ivory-tinted faces massed together like those on a Chinese screen; at the windows of the company's rooms, also crowded with gazers, but saw nobody she knew.
Already the mighty ship began to stir in her water-bed. When she ceased motion again, Helen would be over three thousand miles from home, and the memories of this last trying year. It seemed to her there was not one soul ashore to care whether she went or stayed. Was this worth living for, even as she had lived?
A voice smote upon her ear. It issued from a girl jammed in next to her—a girl younger than herself, extremely pretty, flashily attired, recklessly unconventional. Hers was what Helen recognized to be a Southern voice, low of pitch and soft of cadence, but just now strained to the utmost to make itself audible to a young man in the act of forcing his way through the resistant crowd, to reach the edge of the outer pier from which the ship was now swinging off. To further accentuate her presence among the departing, the young lady was waving a small American flag.
"Jo-oh-n! Oh! Mr. Glynn! Look up! Here I am! Up here!"
Helen started electrically, for it was her John Glynn, and none other, whom this unknown person was thus shamelessly appropriating! He, whom she had been yearning to catch a glimpse of, who she was convinced must know from the papers that she was sailing by this steamer. He, who she had felt sure was in some hidden corner looking after her, although, by her behest, they might not again hold speech one with the other!
"Got here only this minute. Best I could do!" shouted John Glynn back to the stranger, a smile lighting his handsome, manly face.
"Never mind! I understand! Good-by!"
A flower shot down amid the crowd. Several men affected to jump for it, but John Glynn caught it and put it in his coat. His gaze never left Helen's neighbor; to her his eyes were upturned, his hat was waved. In a flash, Miss Carstairs had drawn out of sight and fled within.
She found Miss Bleecker already extended upon the couch in her own stateroom, taking tea, the door opened between, whilst Eulalie, kneeling before steamer trunks and bags, was littering everything near-by with luxurious belongings.