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“Perhaps not,” said Lockert; “though if there’s anything noisier than the small even voice with which an Englishman can murmur, ‘Don’t be so noisy, my dear fellow——!’ Physically, it may carry only a yard, but spiritually it rings clear up through the Heavens! And I’ll be hearing it, now that I’ve become a Colownial. Even my cousin—I was speaking to your husband about him—absolute fanatic about motor transport—I’m to stay with him in Kent. And he’ll be pleasant to me, and gently rebuking——And he’s rather a decent old thing—General Herndon.”

“General Lord Herndon? Of the Italian drive?” said Fran.

“Yes. You see, my revered great-grandfather did so well out of cotton that he was rewarded with a peerage.”

“And you’re so proud of it! That’s why you enjoy your mock humility. You had a quite American thrill in admitting that your cousin is a lordship. It’s bunk—I mean, it’s nonsense, the British assertion that only Americans take titles seriously. You have as much satisfaction out of not calling your cousin ‘Lord’ as——”

“As any charming American woman would out of calling him ‘Lord’!”

She seemed helpless against Lockert’s bland impertinence; she seemed to enjoy being bullied; she admitted, “Yes, perhaps,” and they smiled at each other.

“But seriously,” said Lockert, “you’ll be more English than I am, after you’ve lived there a year. I’ve knocked about so much in South America and Colorado and Ceylon that I’m merely a tramp. Jungle rat.”

“You really think so—that I’ll become English?” She was unguardedly frank, she the ever-guarded.

“Quite.... I say, may I have this dance?”

Lockert, for all his squareness—he was as solid and ungraceful-looking as his favorite mutton-chop—danced easily. Sam drooped in his chair and watched them.

“Nice she has somebody to play with already,” he insisted.

And within three days she had a dozen men to “play with,” to dance and argue with, and race with around the deck. But always it was Lockert who assumed that he was her patron, who looked over her new acquaintances one by one, and was not at all shy about giving his verdict on them. She became helplessly angry at his assumptions, and he apologized so affably and so insincerely that she enjoyed quarreling with him for hours at a time, snuggled in a steamer robe on deck. And when Lockert and she found that they were both devoted to dogs and they became learned about wire-haired terriers, Sam leaned back listening as though she were his clever daughter.

Between times she was gayer with him and more affectionate than she had been for years; and day by day the casualness suitable to a manufacturer like Sam broke down into surprising, uncharted emotions.