Saunterers for exercise or flirtation often turned for a glance at Angela.  What they saw was a slim girl, with pearly fair skin, big gray eyes, quantities of wavy hair of so pale a yellow-brown that it was like gold under the mourning hat she wore.  Her low black collar made the slender throat that rose out of it white as a lily.  The oval of her face was perfect, and when she read or closed her eyes, as she sometimes did, the long lashes, many shades darker than her hair, and the delicate arch of the brown eyebrows, gave her the soft, sweet look of a child asleep.

Always the glances were more admiring than curious; but they were curious, too, for every one was wondering who she was.  In spite of her youth, there was something of pride and distinction about her which made it seem that she could not be an ordinary sort of person you had never heard of; a mere Miss Smith or Mrs. Brown.  Yet all the “swells” on board had been duly accounted for and recognized.  She was not one of them.

“What a pretty girl!” people said.  “And she seems to be travelling alone, unless her friends are too sick to come out of their cabins.  Apparently she hasn’t even brought a maid—­yet what lovely clothes she has, though so simple, and all black.  Perhaps she’s in mourning for her father or her mother, or some near relation.  She’s too young to be a widow!”

Angela did not much mind these glances, or this gentle curiosity, for no normal woman objects to being thought pretty.  But it was delightful to feel sure that no one knew who she was.  If she were on the passenger-list as the Princess di Sereno she would be more stared at and bothered than that poor, fat Duchess of Dorsetshire, who was too near-sighted to recognize her at a distance, thank goodness.  Each glance thrown her way would have been an annoyance, for there would have been nothing flattering in any spice of interest her title gave.  Some silly creatures might have stared at her because she was a princess; but—­far worse—­others would have looked because they knew all about her.

These would have buzzed:  “Why, that’s the Princess di Sereno, don’t you know, the only child of the California millionaire who died about ten years ago, so suddenly while his wife and little daughter were in Europe!  The girl married that Roman prince, Paolo di Sereno, who used to make such a sensation going about in an aeroplane, and gambling high at Monte Carlo—­awfully handsome man, a lot older than she.  He must have been nearly forty, and she seventeen, when she married him.  Her mother made the match, of course:  girl just out of school—­the wedding wasn’t six weeks after she was presented in England.  The prince met her there, has English relations, like most of the Roman nobility.  But the interesting part of the story is this:  they never lived together as husband and wife.  The bride either found out some secret the prince had kept from her (which is what people believe), or else there was a mysterious