Page:Henry rideout--The siamese cat.djvu/32

 of talk, could now and then catch the reader's eye flickering back at them warily out of the corner, like the glance of a nervous mare driven without blinders.

There was nothing in the talk to disturb that best of chaperons. The girl and the young man, having laboriously dug up common acquaintances, pitched them overboard and began to find out more about each other. From their long chairs in the canvas-muffled sunlight, they could look under the rail-awnings, out over the sapphire calm of the South China Sea. All about the ship flying-fish, like silver humming-birds, skimmed along on shivering wings, to vanish into the slope of a little wave with a sunlit splash as of bullets volleyed and scattering.

"I'm never tired of seeing them," said the girl, and screened her eyes with one brown hand.