But there was no need for it. Somehow, the ship seemed to have swallowed Hector. He took his meals in his cabin and only went for a breath of fresh air late at night, nor was it altogether because of the girl that he kept to himself so rigorously. For, knowing his own class and the emphatic, pitiless judgments of his own class when it came to things that “simply aren't done,” he could well imagine what was being said about him in the smoking saloon by the home-English and Anglo-Indians and Anglo-Chinese, all belonging to that social stratum, as hide-bound as the most superstitious Brahmin caste, that puts the niceties of manners and customs far above the niceties of their Christian religion, which preaches forgiveness and plain, straight humanity, and prefers a crimson-handed murderer to a cad.
He had cheated at cards, society said; he had broken an unwritten law; and down there, in the first-class smoking saloon, it was held that a man could put his foot on the decalogue as long as he “played the game.”
And a jolly good rule too; thought Hector, without the slightest trace of bitterness against his country men; for, after all, this unwritten rule had made Britain what she was, fully as much as Magna Charta.
He did not even fell unhappy or depressed when, in his lonely wanderings late at night about the deserted top deck, he heard Jane Warburton's low laugh drift up from the music room.
Hopeless, his love for her? Of course.
Utterly hopeless, and he knew it.
But he stared at the revelation of his love like a new Adam, and he was certain that the original Garden
