Hollister was not thinking particularly of these things.  He had eaten his meal at a table with half a dozen other men.  In the saloon probably two score others applied themselves, with more diligence than refinement, to their food.  There was a leavening of women in this male mass of loggers, fishermen, and what-not.  A buzz of conversation filled the place.  But Hollister was not a participant.  He observed casual, covert glances at his disfigured face, that disarrangement of his features and marring of his flesh which made men ill at ease in his presence.  He felt a recurrence of the old protest against this.  He experienced a return of that depression which had driven him out of Vancouver.  It was a disheartenment from which nothing in the future, no hope, no dream, could deliver him.  He was as he was.  He would always be like that.  The finality of it appalled him.

After a time he became aware of a young woman leaning, like himself, against the rail a few feet distant.  He experienced a curious degree of self-consciousness as he observed her.  The thought crossed his mind that presently she would look at him and move away.  When she did not, his eyes kept coming back to her with the involuntary curiosity of the casual male concerning the strange female.  She was of medium height, well-formed, dressed in a well-tailored gray suit.  Under the edges of a black velvet turban her hair showed glossy brown in a smooth roll.  She had one elbow propped on the rail and her chin nestled in the palm.  Hollister could see a clean-cut profile, the symmetrical outline of her nose, one delicately colored cheek above the gloved hand and a neckpiece of dark fur.

He wondered what she was so intent upon for so long, leaning immobile against that wooden guard.  He continued to watch her.  Would she presently bestow a cursory glance upon him and withdraw to some other part of the ship?  Hollister waited for that with moody expectation.  He found himself wishing to hear her voice, to speak to her, to have her talk to him.  But he did not expect any such concession to a whimsical desire.

Nevertheless the unexpected presently occurred.  The girl moved slightly.  A hand-bag slipped from under her arm to the deck.  She half-turned, seemed to hesitate.  Instinctively, as a matter of common courtesy to a woman, Hollister took a step forward, picked it up.  Quite as instinctively he braced himself, so to speak, for the shocked look that would gather like a shadow on her piquant face.

But it did not come.  The girl’s gaze bore imperturbably upon him as he restored the hand-bag to her hand.  The faintest sort of smile lurked about the corners of a pretty mouth.  Her eyes were a cloudy gray.  They seemed to look out at the world with a curious impassivity.  That much Hollister saw in a fleeting glance.

“Thanks, very much,” she said pleasantly.