He chose the first name he could think of. It was Smith. Of course. Charles Smith.
Somehow, it seemed very natural that Hector should forget the errand which had brought him to the Docks; natural, too, that he should accompany his new friends to their hotel, the Savoy; natural, finally, that he should accept Mr. Ezra Warburton's invitation to come upstairs to their suite, seconded by his daughter's “Do come, Mr. Smith. I know you need a brushing down, and I have an idea you need a drink.”
“I accept both with pleasure,” smiled Hector.
There was a glow in his heart. The world did not seem so black after all; and it was all because of a girl's hazel-brown eyes, because there was a sweet curve to her upper lip and a quick, whimsical lift at the corners.
Had anybody told him just then that he had fallen head-over-heels in love with her, at first sight, Hector would have dismissed the implication as “bally, asinine drivel.” For typically English was he in this, that he treated the softer emotions with a scornful disregard, as if they were a rather vulgar convention submitted to by the masses of irresponsible mankind, which included, at least in this application, all the Continental Europeans and most of the Irish; also some of the Welsh. He did not know that this viewpoint was a pose in self-defense of his shyness and that emotional cold-bloodedness is as a rule an affectation which deceives nobody. Nor did he know that the terrible, corroding Puritanism into which he had dieted himself had not altogether scotched his inmost, smoldering, natural passions.
