As for the Honorable Percival, he had ample opportunity during his long hours of solitary confinement to make a complete inventory of his varied emotions.  Two things which should never be interrupted are a sneeze and a proposal.  That second declaration, so ardently begun and so ruthlessly arrested, still hung in mid-air, and lying on his back in his darkened stateroom, he had ample time in which to survey it from every angle.

Never for a moment did he question the undying nature of his affection for Bobby.  His emotion was too insistent and too consuming to be doubted.  It was the proprieties that he questioned, and they all shook emphatic and disapproving heads.  The proprieties in Grosvenor Square, to be sure, loomed rather dim through the distance; but that immediate propriety in Hong-Kong, toward whom he was speeding with every turn of the screw, towered ominously.

If only he could hold things in abeyance until after the Saluria sailed from Hong-Kong, all might be well.  It was of the utmost importance that he should not present Bobby to Sister Cordelia until the die was irrevocably cast.  Faults that in Miss Boynton of the Big Gully Ranch would be glaring iniquities would, in the wife of the Honorable Percival Hascombe, dwindle away to charming eccentricities.

A daring plan occurred to him.  With proper strategy he might go down to see the steamer off, get left on board, have the return trip in uninterrupted bliss with Bobby, then boldly cable from America that he had met his fate and succumbed to it, and that remonstrances were useless.  The scheme appealed to him the more he considered it.  Cablegrams were necessarily unemotional, and by the time letters were exchanged, the proprieties would probably have decided to accept the will of Providence and try to make the best of dear Percy’s strange choice of an unknown American girl.

In the meanwhile he would devote all his energies to fitting her for the honor about to be conferred upon her, For he had quite given up the idea of the “blossomed bower in dark purple spheres of sea,” and had definitely decided to take her back to England as the future mistress of Hascombe Hall.  All he asked was six months in which to cut and polish his priceless gem.

It was not until the evening before the Saluria was due in Hong-Kong that the sea got over its fit of temper and decided to make that last night the most beautiful one of the crossing.  Everybody was down for the farewell dinner.  Even those who had been invisible for two days emerged from their state-rooms like gorgeous butterflies from their cocoons.  Speeches were made, toasts were drunk, and a general air of festivity prevailed.

Percival raged inwardly at the length of the dinner.  The golden moments were racing by, and he was in a fever to get Bobby away to himself, he had decided on a course which he felt did credit to his power of self-control.  He would permit himself the luxury of showing her that her affection for him was wholly returned, without in any way committing himself to a definite engagement.  He would, in short, ask her to accept a sort of promissory note on his affections, to be presented at any time after the steamer left Hong-Kong.