"Smokes too much," thought Westenra, and might have supposed her left-handed but for a worn, hard little mark on her right middle finger. "Writes, and smokes while she 's writing," he deducted, and thought none the better of her for that. When she ordered a brandy-and-soda to drink with the sardine she was dissecting he liked her still less.

"She won't be in the game long at that rate," he estimated grimly. "With her nerves I 'll give her another two years at most." He hated to see women drink. Experience had taught him that few of them can do it long without going to pieces morally. And here was one who would certainly go to pieces physically as well. On this conclusion he felt no further inclination for observations. But that did not prevent him from hearing what she had to say. She had struck up a little conversation with the man on the other side of her, speaking in a nervous contralto voice that, without being throaty, contained a curious husky tremor giving almost the suggestion that she wore a veil over it. Without the assistance of his previous deductions Westenra would have known it at once for the voice of a temperamental woman, as well as that of a woman of the world; and was the more astonished therefore, at her free bon camarade manner with her neighbour, a French Jew with a mean expression on a clever face--a financier or dealer in jewels Westenra judged, and a none too scrupulous one at that. They talked about the ice on the table and where it had come from. The Jew was not sure whether it was Norwegian ice or manufactured on the boat, but was full of information about the New York supply and the great frozen lakes from which it was cut in enormous blocks.

"I must go and see them!" said the woman eagerly, "and the far solitary tracts of ice and snow in Alaska! I must see them."

She talked like a woman who had fever in her veins.

"You like cold places?" asked the Jew curiously.

"No! No! I hate cold, but I like wide, solitary, empty lands and countries I have never been to. I would love to wake up every morning of my life in afresh place."

Westenra admired reserve in a woman, and was thoroughly astounded at such a lack of it. There was worse to come. Her friendly candour revived the French heart of the Jew to a corresponding friendliness which by some persons might have been considered impertinent, but did not seem in the least to offend this one.

"Excuse me, mad'moiselle, but I never saw such original bracelets. Might one ask what they are made of?"

"Ivory," she answered pleasantly. "I got them in Central Africa. They were cut green from an elephant's trunk."

"Elephant's trunk!" murmured the Jew, and even Westenra had to smile.

"Oh! tusk I mean, of course. And the red things imbedded in them are garnets from De Beers's Mine in Kimberley. I think they are ever so much nicer than diamonds, don't you?"

The Jew tried to look as if he did, and succeeded fairly well.

"Here is another in my silver ring. A Zulu made this ring for me in Natal, out of a half-crown. I gave him the garnet to put in, and another half-crown for making it."

If the Jew were outraged at the idea of any lady wearing such cheap jewellery, he concealed his feelings under a silky smile.

"Then you know Africa, mad'moiselle?"

"I know every country except America," she said. "But I think Africa is the only one in the world that I could stay in always without getting bored."

"Ah! Is it Johannesburg you like?"

"Oh, no--Rhodesia--Zululand--the Drakenberg Mountains--the open veldt."

The Jew stared.

"For a lady you have been to very unusual places," he commented, and if the words were ambiguous the tone was not lacking in courtesy.

"I love to travel," she said, "and it is my business to see things and places. I am a journalist."

"Indeed!" said the Jew, and stared again, for she was quite unlike any journalist he had ever met or heard of. But she gave him no time for any further astonished questions.

"I must go," she said abruptly. "This saloon is too hot." Smiling pleasantly at him she drank up her brandy-and-soda and departed, the Jew rising up also and bowing her out of her seat in a way that Westenra considered officious, yet could not but notice that with a courteous smile on him the fellow was not so mean-looking after all. The Irishman gave a glance after the figure of his late neighbour. She was tall and slight with a firm light walk, but as she went down the aisle made by two long dining-tables the ship rolled gently, and she put out her pale brown hands here and there touching a chair back.

Proceeding with his dinner, which had as yet only reached the second course, Westenra reflected that it would be difficult for any woman, even with a bet to win, to give herself and her affairs away more thoroughly in a short space of time than his late neighbour had done.

"With both hands she did it--and her tongue," he mused cynically. "In no longer a time than it took to dine off a brandy-and-soda and the outline of a sardine!"

After sitting next to her for a matter of twenty minutes he knew all there was to be known of her tastes, her profession, her temperament, her habits. She had travelled, she wrote for the newspapers,--sensational stuff probably, her head was too small for a thinker's head,--she was entirely modern, cursed with nerves, restlessness, and dissatisfaction; she was unreserved, unreposeful, uncontrolled, undisciplined; she drank, she smoked. He really could not think of anything about her, except her charming voice, which of course she could not help, that was not in violent opposition to his every idea of what a woman should be, and the fact filled him with resentment born of a kind of chivalrous discontent that any woman should be so far from the ideal standard. He entirely withdrew his earlier supposition that she was a woman of the world, in spite of the evidence of travel and experience.

"A woman of her type could never contend with any kind of social life. The way she let that Jew draw her was childish."

At that moment something happened that thrilled through his nerves and veins like an electric shock, and left him mentally stunned.

The woman of whom he had been thinking was coming back down the long saloon, her delicate hands put out to the chair backs in the same little frond-like movement as before. For the first time he saw her face clear and full; and he did not have to look twice to recognise it. Though it had always eluded his memory in waking hours he knew it now that he saw it as well as his own. It was the face of the woman he had dreamed of for years. He knew her hair, her eyes, her mouth, the grey gown she had on, the deep collar of fine lace ivoried by age that turned away from the base of a long throat that had fine ivory tints of its own. He even knew the necklace of luminous grey-green beads that swung to her waist. The wistfulness of the Irishry that he remembered so well lurked elusively about her eyes and mouth, and the touch of Orientalism was there too, though it was hard to tell of what it came, for if her hair was black and her skin Arab-pale, her sad eyes were not dark but of a curious smoky blue. As she came nearer she looked straight at him, her glance for a moment seeming to rest in his, and he saw that like the eyes of many clever people hers possessed a slight defect; they were different in shape and expression; one seemed to be long and sleepy and almost cynical looking, the other, rounder, held an eager inquiring glance that suggested great vitality and ardour. This was Westenra's fleeting impression, there was no time for more, and he was almost too aghast for clear thought; but a glance of his eye went a good deal further than most people's, and in this instance his vision was sharpened by the strange circumstances of his dream.

It appeared that she had come back to her seat to fetch a little silk bag of the kind that women were then using to carry about their handkerchiefs and purses. She spoke to no one, only leaned over the back of her seat, took her bag and went away, and it was all over in two or three seconds. But in those few seconds a man's life had been changed. The world would never look the same again to Garrett Westenra. Obliged to add to all his scornful opinions of the woman who had sat next to him outraging his ideals, the astounding knowledge that she was the woman of his dreams, the living presentment of the vision that had for years so mystically haunted his life, he was shaken to the Celtic roots of him. He felt as a man feels who has lost something precious and irreplaceable. Something was broken and gone from his life. The beautiful spun-glass globe of illusion he had carried so secretly was shattered in the dust. In that moment of bitter realisation he was not a surgeon and scientist from New York, but a primitive man from Ireland keening in silence for a nameless sorrow. The desert grief of his race welled up from the depths of him, and the taste of his waters was as the taste of the waters of Marah.