The utterly preposterous fact that a Hascombe of Hascombe Hall had been jilted was too amazing a circumstance to be concealed, and the county buzzed with rumors. The Honorable Percival, whose pride had sustained a compound fracture, set sail immediately for America. After a hurried trip across the continent, he was embarking again, this time for Hong-Kong, where a sympathetic married sister held out embracing arms, and a promise of refuge from wagging tongues.
As he moved languidly down the deck and sank into the steamer-chair that bore his name, he assured himself for the fortieth time since leaving England that life bored him to tears. He had sounded its joys and its sorrows, he had exhausted its thrills; it was like a scenic railway over which he was compelled to ride after every detail had become monotonously familiar. There was nothing more for him to learn about life, nothing more for him to feel. At least that is what the Honorable Percival thought. But when one reckons too confidently on having exhausted the varieties of human experience, one is apt to get a jolt.
Carefully selecting a cigarette from a gold case, he struck a light, and, after a whiff or two, lay back and, closing his eyes on the stir and confusion, gave himself up to painful reflections. His shrunken self-esteem, like a feathered thing exposed to wet weather, was clamoring for a sunny spot in which to expand to natural proportions. Had he been able to remain at home, the unending chorus of feminine praise would soon have dried his draggled feathers and left him preening himself contentedly in the comforting assurance that Lady Hortense was in no way worthy of him. But being confronted thus suddenly with the necessity of supplying his egotism with all its nourishment, he found himself unequal to the task. Behind every consoling thought stalked that totally incredible "No." He tortured his brain for possible reasons for Hortense's deflection, but could find none. Detail by detail he reviewed their acquaintance from the first time he had bowed over her fingers, in Lord Carlton's hunting-lodge, to the moment he had touched his lips to the same fingers in formal farewell on the terrace at Hascombe Hall. It had been such a well-bred courtship from the start, so thoroughly approved by both sides, so perfectly conducted throughout!
Then, following suddenly on this smooth course of events, came a series of bumps that made Percival wince as he recalled them: protests, evasions, humiliating questions on the part of the public, and then ignominious flight. He shuddered as he thought of the dull, wet days on the Atlantic and his hideous week in America. He had been in a perpetual state of protest against everything from the hotel service to what he termed the "crass vulgarity of the States."
There had been but one oasis in the desert of gloom through which he had traveled, and that had been on his interminable trip across the continent, when for ten brief minutes his blight had been lifted, and he had caught a breath of the incense for which his soul hungered.
It was at a little station in Wyoming that he, a convalescent from love, had for the first time in weeks managed to look up and take a bit of amatory nourishment. He was standing alone on the rear platform of the observation-car, arms on railing, watching with no interest whatever the taking off of mail-bags. Suddenly within his line of vision came a stalwart young chap and a girl, each astride a bronco. They drew rein at the platform, cursorily scanned the waiting train, glanced at him, then at each other, and, apparently without the slightest reason, burst into unrestrained merriment. Percival continued to survey them calmly and haughtily through his monocle. His first glance had revealed the fact that the girl was strikingly pretty. Her lithe young body showed round and comely in its khaki suit and brown leggings. Her black mane was braided in two short, thick plaits with a dash of scarlet ribbons at the ends. Blue eyes, full of daring, danced under the blackest of brows, and the smile she flashed at her companion revealed a dimple of distracting proportions.
As Percival gazed he was quite oblivious of the fact that the laugh was at his expense. In fact, he accorded her darting glances a far more flattering interpretation, and when her escort dismounted, and disappeared within the station, he deliberately caught her eye and held it. There was a touch of daring in her face and figure, an evident sense of security in the fact that the train was already beginning to move. He shifted his position from the end of the platform to the side next the station, and she met the challenge by gathering up her reins and keeping pace with the slow-moving train.
For a short distance road and track lay parallel, and as the train slowly got under way, the bronco was put to a run. Side by side, not ten feet apart, Percival and the girl moved abreast, their eyes keeping company. He had never seen anything so vitally young and untrammeled as she was. She rode superbly, like an Indian, leaning well forward, gripping the bronco with her knees, with one hand grasping his mane. Every muscle was tense with life, every nerve a-quiver with glee. Before the young Englishman knew it, his own sluggish blood was stirring in his veins through sympathy. Then the train began to gain upon her, and throwing herself back in the saddle, she shook a vanquished head. As Percival raised his cap she wheeled her horse, and, standing in the stirrups, blew an audacious kiss from her finger-tips. The next instant she was dashing away across the wide, bleak prairies, the only living thing in sight, her scarlet ribbons a streak of color in the dull-gray landscape.
Percival had taken heart of grace from that airy kiss. It stood to him as a symbol that, though one of the sex had proved a deserter to his standard, there were still volunteers. He treasured the incident as a king treasures the homage of his humblest subject when rebellion is rife in the kingdom. On such trifles often hang one's self-esteem.
When the stir and bustle on deck became so lively that he was no longer able to indulge in introspection, he got up and indifferently joined the moving throng. The warning had sounded for those going ashore, and the numerous gangways were crowded. Passengers lined the promenade-deck, shouting and waving to the crowd on the wharf below. From the bridge-deck the captain could be heard cheerfully swearing through a megaphone at the second officer below. Chinese deck-stewards glided about in their felt slippers, trying to attach the right person to the right steamer-chair. Cabin-boys scurried about with baskets of fruit and flowers and other sea-going impedimenta that, after one appreciative glance from the recipient, are usually consigned to the ice-box. All was noise and confusion.
Percival's critical eye swept the line of human backs that presented themselves at the railing. The same old types! He could describe them with his eyes shut: the conventional globe-trotters, avid to obtain and to impart information; business men comparing statistics and endlessly discussing the tariff; rich wanderers in quest of health; poor missionaries in quest of "foreign fields"; fussy Frenchmen; stolid Germans; a few suspicious-looking Englishmen; and always the ubiquitous Americans, who had the same effect upon him that a highly colored cloth has on the delicate sensibilities of a certain large animal.
The most conspicuous example of the last class was a somewhat noisy young person in a still more resonant steamer-coat who hung at an angle of forty-five degrees over the railing, and exchanged confidences of a personal nature with an old man on the wharf twenty feet below. Every time Percival's walk brought him toward the bow of the boat, his eyes were offended by that blue-and-lavender steamer-coat and by a pair of beaded-leather slippers with three straps across the instep and absurdly high French heels. Could any one but an American, he soliloquized, be guilty of starting on a journey in such a costume?
The prospect of being imprisoned between decks for four weeks, with this heterogeneous collection appalled him. His only safety lay in maintaining a rigid and uncompromising aloofness. He would discourage all advances from the start, he would promptly nip in the bud the first sign of intrusion. He had left the only country an Englishman regards as the proper place for existence, to cross two abominable seas and an even more abominable continent, for the sole purpose of privacy, and privacy he meant to have at all costs.
As the Saluria weighed anchor and steamed out of the Golden Gate, he went below to see that his valet had made satisfactory disposition of his varied belongings. His state-room was at the end of a short passage leading from the main, one, and he was displeased at finding the deep ledge under the passage window completely filled with flowers and fruit that evidently