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meeting could be the preamble to any number of things. So I anticipated a second approach.
    It did not come. She did emerge back on the deck after a time, carrying a book of her own, but merely nodded in a friendly fashion before settling into a shaded corner to read. A glance at the cover showed it to be a volume of Shakespeare’s plays, heavy going for someone to whom modern English was a foreign country. From the corner of my eye, I watched her struggles, and waited for her to put forward a question.
    She did not. Two hours later, when she closed the book and stood up, I expected her to “notice” me and resume our conversation. Instead, she briefly joined a group of fellow passengers exclaiming at a pod of dolphins riding our bow-wake, then went below without so much as a glance.
    When the sun was hovering at the horizon, with the sea reassuringly calm, I went to the cabin to get ready for dinner—for which, it being the first night, formal dress was not required. In any event, I needed to survey the options for table companions. We had followed our standard shipboard survival plan of booking an entire table with the purser, telling him that we would provide the names later. Over the course of the day, I had identified a handful of candidates for the remaining seats: two solitary schoolteachers, a young wife travelling alone (but for a pair of small children and their omnipresent nanny), an elderly woman artist gone contentedly deaf, and a professor of botany from an American agricultural college. During pre-dinner cocktails in the Palm Lounge, each of these proved almost pathetically grateful to be invited to join us, and Iwas about to take the list of names to the purser (and tell him firmly that we would begin such arrangements tonight) when I spotted Miss Sato in the doorway.
    She did not look fifteen years old now. Paint emphasised her mouth and eyes, heels brought her up to a more adult height, and her dress made the most of her boyish figure. Again I waited for an overture. Again, she gave me a friendly dip of the upper torso, then began threading her way through the crowded room towards another young Japanese woman a couple of inches taller than Miss Sato. The two greeted each other with bows rather than embraces, and their expressions seemed to contain the reserve of near-strangers. As I watched their apparently brittle conversation, I reflected that the vocabulary of non-verbal interactions was at times more foreign than a language: I could not tell if these two had recently met, or were long-time friends—or long-lost sisters. The two accepted drinks from the tray of a passing waiter. Within seconds, a pair of young American men came up, drawn like wasps around a picnic, causing shy giggles and knowing glances. Before long, several other Westerners, male and female, had joined them.
    I felt almost jilted.
    “Whom are you studying so intently, Russell?”
    I turned away from the social gathering with a wry smile. “A perfect innocent whom I suspected of hidden plots. Holmes, your misanthropy is contagious.”
    “The alert young lady with the muscles of a gymnast?”
    “Precisely! What gave her away?”
    “Less the build than the balance. A typhoon wouldn’t tip her over.”
    “Well, now she juggles books rather than clubs. She lingered on deck earlier, and I feared she might be playing up to me. It would appear that she was merely being friendly.” I glanced at his fingernails, wrapped around a glass. He’d scrubbed away the engine-room grime, leaving the skin a bit raw: I for one had no intention of joining him for lessons from that instructor. “If you’re interested in language tutorials that don’t involve smothering heat and asphyxiating smoke, Miss Sato might be worth asking.”
    Thus, from being a suspicious character, Miss Sato became a resource. We were too late to claim her for our table, but she dutifully introduced us to her friend, Fumiko Katagawa, and once I had reciprocated with my