"You're a great pleader, Mac. I'll give you my word. I'll go."
"Look here, McLeod, you're gone batty on that subject. I know an address in Prince Edward Island. If you continue to talk as foolishly as you have been doing the last few days, I'll write and peach on you."
"Oh, no, you won't! But just to change the subject, look at old De Vaux meeting them. He's so excited that I shouldn't wonder to see him take an apoplectic fit."
Mr. MacAllister, his wife, and daughter had just left the boat. A large, fleshy man, with a clean-shaven, florid face, bulging blue eyes, and all his features except the double chin bunched unnecessarily close together, was hurrying forward to meet them in a state of perspiring excitement and nervousness. He was carrying his white sun-helmet in one hand, mopping his brows with a huge handkerchief held in the other, and all the while the mid-summer tropical sun was beaming down on his shining face, and on his head with its quite inadequate covering of hair.
"Mr. MacAllister! ... You cannot know what pleasure it gives me to welcome you to Formosa.... 'Pon my soul, you cannot! ... I have been twenty years in Formosa, and this is the greatest pleasure I have experienced.... 'Pon my honour, it is!"
"Glad to see you again, Mr. De Vaux. If I remember right, the last time we saw each other was in our office at Amoy, five years ago last May."
"That is so, Mr. MacAllister.... Lord, what a memory you have! ... I don't know another man on the China Coast who would have remembered a date like that.... 'Pon my soul, I do not!"
"Mr. De Vaux, I wish you to meet my wife and daughter. My dear, allow me to present Mr. De Vaux. My wife, Mr. De Vaux. My daughter, Mr. De Vaux."
The stout man bent double in profound bows, dropping his hat to the very ground, gurgling something almost inarticulate with excitement:
"Mrs. MacAllister! ... I am so pleased! ... Bless my soul! Miss MacAllister.... This is the happiest moment of my life.... 'Pon my honour, it is!"
Above them on the deck Sinclair was saying to McLeod:
"Who is this De Vaux, anyway? Of course, I know that he is chief agent in Formosa of MacAllister, Munro Co. But who is he and what are his antecedents?"
"That is just the question," replied McLeod. "We know, and we don't know. We know that the Honourable Lionel Percival Dudley de Vaux is the oldest known son of the late Lord Eversleigh, the oldest brother or half-brother of the present lord. But why he is out here sweltering and swearing in this steambath of a climate while his younger brother enjoys the cool shade of his ancestral parks and halls, and holds down a seat in the Lords, no one seems to know. Some say that he is the son of the late lord by a Scotch marriage in his wild-oat stage; some that he is a son born to the late lord by the countess dowager before wedlock. At any rate, he was shipped to the Far East as a boy, and here he has been these more than twenty years, pensioned, they say, to keep out of England."