Page:C Q, or, In the Wireless House (Train, 1912).djvu/29

 “An infectious little red devil!” Mrs. Hubert Trevelyan called him—she of the white pony-coat and the string of melting blue-white pearls, who liked to joke with Micky on the boat deck and visit him in the wireless house, and whose full-blown, rosily radiant beauty filled him with a vague uneasiness. Yet it was not his looks,— he had freckles, blue eyes, and auburn-red hair,—but his smile that drew people to him, first and second cabin alike, and made it quite impossible for even the purple-nosed captain to be as harsh with him as his escapades deserved—as, for example, that night at Algiers when he had kept the ship waiting an hour, with the tide on the ebb, while he won £i6 at the little horses in the Casino. And this particular captain was, at that, the worst it had been his ill luck to serve under in either the Pacific, the Atlantic, or the Indian Ocean, since his first job en the old Fulda of the Lloyds’. Now he earned £3 per month on a 17,000-ton Cunarder, was rated as an assistant purser and ranked the barber and Hooks, the head second-cabin steward.

It had been quite natural for him to go into the Marconi service, for he had always dabbled