CAPTAIN JANSEN met us at the gangway. There were some changes in the look of the Violetta's deck since last I had seen it, a year and a half before, in the West Indies. The awning was new. Those geranium pots were gone, which used to stand along the scuppers, and be carried down every night and whenever the weather threatened. The world had been too much for them. The same doilies were on the same rocking chairs. There was the brown mahogany parlour table. But among objects that recalled home conventions, something that breathed eastward, a tropic touch here and there, had been admitted. A huge Burmese tapestry swung from one side of the awning, and the breeze bayed it in, its green embroidered serpents writhing lazily above an honest but uninspiring sofa from Grand Rapids. Yellow Chinese mats from Singapore were on the deck in place of the former flowered carpet.

Mrs. Ulswater sat in her familiar rocking chair, small, thin, quiet, and slightly precise; and on one of the mats, with her back against Mrs. Ulswater's chair, sat a girl in a white dress, with dark hair, with very definite eyebrows and a tilted, provocative nose. In front of her, on another mat, sat Chepa smoking a cigarette. At some distance off, a motionless figure in dingy white crouched in the shadow of the cabin, whom I took to be Ram Nad engaged in abstraction. These were the occupants of the after-deck.

“Kit!” cried Mrs. Ulswater, dropping her knitting. Susannah sprang up and cried: “Did we beat the Mayor?”

I told them about the insurrection, Jimmie Hagan's arrest, and the Mayor's surrender, and how I wanted Dr. Ulswater to take charge of The Union Electric's cash.

“I'm ever so much obliged for your insurrection, Mrs. Ulswater. As to the Mayor—well, you've been around the world yourself since I saw you, and got acquainted with the Gentile. What do you think of him?”

“Whom do you mean by the Gentile?”

“The alien, the uncanny human who isn't like us. His 'best is like his worst,' isn't it? in our eyes, because both his best and his worst are different from ours.”

“I like him better than I expected to,” she answered.

“Are you going to keep on rearranging him?”

“I'm not so sure as I was what his arrangement is.”

“But the cruise of the Violetta has been a success, hasn't it?”

After a moment's thought she said:

“When it began, I didn't know what I wanted, but I thought I should know it when I saw it. And that was the way it turned out. I found out what it was, when I found it. The doctor and Susannah are most of it.”

“It wasn't the missions, then?”

“Not exactly. It's partly finding things to do, and doing them as they come along.” After a pause she said, as if changing the subject:

“Do you think you can get on with the Mayor here, after all this?”

“Why, that's the question. The Mayor has his virtues, but he doesn't like insurrections or paying bills. If Providence didn't afflict him with one or the other of those now and then, he might be a philosopher; but now you speak of it, I shouldn't say he was a good loser. It's one of the characteristics of the tropics, to carry grudges long and far.”

Susannah was looking at me gravely.

“Do you make poetry?” she asked.

“Not in the way of business,” I said, still thinking of my troubles. “It's Portate that introduces poetry into business. If I propose to the Mayor to put in five hundred new lights, he proposes a procession. If I tell him I'm going to repaint some of the trolley cars, he announces it that night to the populace from the balcony of magistrates, and the populace comes and asks me for a free ride, and The Union Electric's employÉs claim it's a holiday. You see, Miss Romney——”

“Why, I'm Susannah?”

“Oh! Well, Susannah—You see, Susannah, Portate furnishes all the poetry The Union Electric Company will stand. They can't afford to let me decorate the situation too. That's why I have some doubts about the ultimatum and the insurrection. They were rather decorative, weren't they?”

“I'm going to make poetry about you,” said Susannah.

She got up and walked away across the deck, in the manner of one conducting powerful operations with the muses. She came to where the dingy heap of eastern wisdom sat against the cabin wall.

“Ram Nad!” we heard her say, with a stamp of the foot, “you go this minute and get your shawl!”

He rose silently, pale and venerable, and went down the companionway.

“He catches cold easily,” Mrs. Ulswater explained. “I told him not to sit out evenings without his shawl.”

Chepa and Hagan had gone forward sometime before. Susannah paced the deck apart with folded arms, making poetry about me. Mrs. Ulswater sat in her rocking chair, knitting, listening, talking.

I was thinking that she would have been a dangerous woman, with all that will and reserve, if she had not happened to be honest and kind. She could not help but foresee and devise. I wondered if she were plotting and planning at the moment, and for whose benefit. Likely it was for mine. I wondered if the Mayor were plotting and planning for my distress or destruction at the same moment. Likely he was. I didn't much care. Mrs. Ulswater had rearranged the tropics here and there, but they had not rearranged her. It was about eleven o'clock. Susannah was extraordinarily pretty. As the subject of a ballad by Susannah, of a plot by Mrs. Ulswater, and another plot by the Mayor, supposing all these things were going on, I seemed to be in the centre of things.

At that moment the sound of oarlocks startled us. We rose and went to the rail. A boat drew near on the dark water. On the surface of the water the lights of the distant city made long broken reflections. The boat drew up at the foot of the gangway, and Dr. Ulswater mounted, followed by a large powerful man, gray-haired, with a long dangling moustache and lean throat, carrying on his broad shoulders a large oblong box. Behind them came up one of the boatman, carrying a trunk. Susannah cried:

“What's in the box?”

And I said, catching sight of my initials, “Where'd you get my trunk?”

“Jansen,” said Dr. Ulswater, “get up steam. We leave as soon as you're ready.” A moment later we were seated under the awning; Mrs. Ulswater in her rocking chair knitting and nowise excited; Susannah, her hands clasped about her knees, back against the rocker, eagerly absorbing all things; the doctor, the grizzled Sadler and I, each negotiating one of the doctor's cigars. Chepa, with his cigarette, and Hagan, with his black clay pipe and extravagant hair, squatted together on the deck.