Incidentally, she had obtained the information from her maid, a nose-tilted coquette who extracted ship's secrets from a youthful quartermaster.
"Well--er--I had forgotten," explained the tactful sailor.
"Is it true ?" Lady Tozer _was_ unusually abrupt today.

But she was annoyed by the assumption that the captain took a mere girl into his confidence and passed over the wife of the ex-Chief Justice of Hong Kong.
"Yes, it is," said Captain Ross, equally curt, and silently thanking the fates that her ladyship was going home for the last time.
"How horrible!" she gasped, in unaffected alarm.

This return to femininity soothed the sailor's ruffled temper.
Sir John, her husband, frowned judicially.

That frown constituted his legal stock-in-trade, yet it passed current for wisdom with the Hong Kong bar.
"What evidence have you ?" he asked.
"Do tell us," chimed in Iris, delightfully unconscious of interrupting the court.

"Did you find out when you squinted at the sun ?" The captain smiled.