The Honorable Percival

								

on, but the fact that he was a spectator showed that he was
relaxing the rigid rules he had laid down for himself. The only person
who addressed him during the day was Bobby Boynton, who gave him a free
and easy greeting when they met in the morning, and then seemed to
forget his existence. His fear that she would follow up the conversation
begun in the companionway was apparently groundless, for she seemed
ridiculously engrossed in other things.
Among the half-dozen young people on board who were perpetually
organizing tournaments, dances, card-parties, and concerts, she was the
most indefatigable. Not being responsible to any one for her actions,
and possessing a creative imagination, she indulged in escapades that
provided the older people with their chief topic of conversation. Her
sternest critics, however, smiled as they shook their heads.
The captain from the first had treated her very much as he treated the
other passengers. The parental rôle was not a familiar one, and he
shirked it. The only time that he rose to a sense of duty was when he
found her in the writing-room, her head bent over a desk. Then rumor
said authority was bruskly asserted, letters were confiscated, and tears
flowed instead of ink.
About the time the Honorable Percival was congratulating himself on
having put her in her proper place, and having kept her there, his
confidence received a shock. Coming on deck one day, he found her again
seated in his steamer-chair. This time she made no pretense of rising,
but obligingly made a place for him on the foot-rest. The invitation was
loftily declined.
"I've been waiting a coon's age for you," she said, with an audacious
upward glance. "I wanted to tell you that I've put you on the program
for a song at the concert to-morrow night."
"Quite impossible; I shouldn't think of such a thing for a moment,"
he began; then curiosity got the better of his annoyance. "But if I may
ask, how on earth did you know that I sang?"
Bobby's eyes danced, and her submerged dimple came to the surface.
"I didn't," she said; "but they dared me to ask you, and I wouldn't take
a dare, would you?"
"I am afraid I don't quite follow you," said Percival.
"Well, you see," explained Bobby, "they dared me to ask you, and I didn't
mind, because I was dead sure you sang. A person ought to be able to do
anything with a voice like yours."
Percival stroked his small mustache meditatively.
"As a matter of fact, you know," he said in a tone from which the chill
had vanished, "I suppose an English voice is rather conspicuous among
Americans, isn't it?"
"Yours is," said Bobby; "that is, what I've heard of it."
And then she was gone like a flash, leaving the Honorable Percival to
cogitate upon the extraordinary manners of American girls, and a certain
cleverness they at times displayed. Lady Hortense Vevay, for instance,
had had four uninterrupted weeks in which to discover anything unusual