her eyes
grew rounder than buttons and very large.

"Why it's Oliver and he's kissing Aunt _Nancy_!" she squeaked in a small
voice of reproachful surprise.

XLIX

Whatever the number was of the second-class stateroom on the _Citric_,
it was rather too far down in the belly of that leviathan to have suited
fashionable people. But Oliver and Nancy had stopped being fashionable
some time before and they told each other that it was _much_ nicer than
first-class on one of the small liners with apparent conviction and
never got tired of rejoicing at their luck in its being an outside.
It was true that the port-hole might most of the time have been wholly
ornamental for all the good it did them, for it was generally splashed
with grey October sea, but, at least, as Nancy lucently explained, you
could see things--once there had actually been a porpoise--and that
neither of them, in their present condition, would have worried very
much about it if their cabin had been an aquarium was a fact beyond
dispute.

"Time to get up, dear!" This is Oliver a little sternly from the upper
berth. "That was your bath that came in a minute ago and said something
in Cockney. At least I _think_ it was--mine's voice is a good deal more
like one of Peter's butlers--" "But, Ollie, I'm so _comfortable_!"

"So am I. But think of breakfast."

"Well--breakfast is a point." Then she chuckles, "Oh, Ollie, wouldn't it
have been _awful_ if we'd either of us been bad sailors!"

"We couldn't have been," says Oliver placidly. "We have too much luck."

"I know but--that awful woman with the face like a green pea--oh, Ollie,
you'd have hated me--we are lucky, darling."

Oliver has thought seriously enough about getting up to be dangling his
legs over the edge of his shelf by now.

"Aren't we?" he says soberly. "I mean I am."

"_I_ am. And everybody's being so nice about giving us checks we can use
instead of a lot of silly things we wouldn't know what to do with." She
smiles. "Those are your feet," she announces gravely.

"Yes. Well?"

"Oh, nothing. Only I'm going to tickle them."

"You're not? Ouch--Nancy, you _little devil_!" and Oliver slides hastily
to the floor. Then he goes over to the port-hole.

"A very nice day!" he announces in the face of a bull's eye view of dull
skies and oily dripping sea.

"Is it? How kind of it! Ollie, I must get up." "Nancy, you must." He
goes over and kneels awkwardly by the side of her berth--an absu