“She was about as approachable as the Eiffel Tower. She was the first bit of peerage I had ever seen traveling alone, and I would prefer trying to get chummy with an iceberg to speaking to her. But a man or a woman had to be armor plate to withstand Tib when he put himself out, and at the end of one day he had made her laugh; then she got a bit interested in him and I knew he was spinning romance.
“When he got to giving his Vermont family an old chateau environment and spoke of the good old days at ‘The Oaks,’ and his father’s pack of hounds, aristocracy wanted to crawl into a safe deposit vault and slam the door or get scalped. He could jam more poetry and pâté de foie gras breeding into his round form and look more dreamy passion from his pleading eyes than any man that ever made a house believe a bum show was a good one. He was all right, I tell you, and if Little Eva hadn’t butted in when we were doing things to the equator, and asked him to come down and play stud-poker in the smoking-room, I reckoned he’d have won a few plighted troths anyway. I shall always believe he had her clinging to the ropes when Eva made the fatal stab.
“‘Do you know those people in the second cabin?’ demanded Her Lordship with an eighty-two degrees north voice.
“Tib groaned and tore his brown hair and admitted he owned us. ‘The vase is broken,’ he cried. ‘I’ve got the bell and it’s back to the barriers.’
“Well, he felt so bad over that girl that he almost wept. It wa’n’t her titled papa, or the coat of arms; it was just a case of She. When he was talking to her he forgot he was merely a showman. He believed all about the old ivy-covered manse and the hounds. Why, I’ve even heard him call the pups by name. And his father never owned anything more blue-blooded than a sheepdog.
“‘Billy,’ he said to me as we smoked down aft, ‘I never met a girl yet I felt so soft over. I know I’m older than she by some years, but I keep my age locked up in the baggage-room and we might have been happy if not for Little Eva.’
“And Miss English was mad. She scolded the Captain for presenting Tib, and told him her father would do things once we’d sighted old earth. And the Captain was on the anxious seat, for her father was his meal ticket and had delegated him to fetch out his daughter O. K. But on the next night we began to forget it, when we steamed into the heart of a flying wedge of terrific winds.
“I decided that if ever we got ashore it would be to have the folks come down to the beach and look at us and say, ‘How natural they look.’ Some of the gingerbread works were carried away the first night of the blow, and whenever the wind let up a bit the live stock would throw in a few ensembles that made one pray for more breeze. Yet the boat behaved well, and if something hadn’t happened to the propeller we’d have come through in rare form. But when the chief engineer began to parade out his kit and try to mend things while standing on his head I knew the game was getting serious. Now we were bumped by every billow, and I heard a petty officer whisper that we were being driven far from our course.
“At last the kick stopped, or else we’d slipped out of the storm zone, and at about three o’clock in the morning we dropped anchor near a dear little island that the Captain couldn’t name with any great degree of exactness.
“The anchorage was so good and the water so smooth that our engineer said it would be easy to take the boat to pieces and put it together without losing even a shingle nail. Well, you can indulge in a small wager that we were all up and happy when we came near enough to smell the land. The sky was clear and peppered over with incandescent lights, and Tib felt so good that he waltzed up to the She Saxon and observed: ‘I regret you have been inconvenienced by the storm.’