Page:MacGrath--The luck of the Irish.djvu/75

 than next to some one who might be wholly prosaic and uninteresting. He would at least afford her a little amusement.

He gave a quick nod of his head—well shaped under its thatch—and strode away to interview the chief steward. He looked like a very strong young man, good-humored until aroused, and then she imagined rather a difficult customer. She had handled his prototype in boyhood; wild little animals, always ready to play or fight, impervious to anything but kindness. The Irish—how well she knew them, hot-headed, passionate in their hates and loves, with an exaggerated sense of loyalty, sensitive in the extreme, generous to a fault, and always blue-eyed. Perhaps she should have snubbed him for a day or so; but she, too, had been lonely. Had she not begun this long voyage for the very dread of loneliness? Had she not suddenly and desperately craved for strange scenes, multitudes?

At dinner that night he was at her right, at one of the beam tables on the port side. She noticed that he made no mistakes, that his table manners were good. On the other side of her was another young man, somewhere in the thirties. He was as far removed from the Grogan type as the moon is from Mars. Immaculately dressed, suave, polished, good-looking, he managed to divert her attention frequently.

William was dressed in his every-day clothes, and he scowled as his roving eye caught the flash of white shirt-bosoms here and there among the