of of the ship, and you're having a chair all to yourself so that you
can write postcards to Gran."

His face cleared immediately, though as they got settled in the shadow
of one of the lifeboats and he saw Mrs. Hetherington's white figure
walking along the quay he gave a little sigh. She addressed his
postcards as far as his remembered stock of addresses would go. Several
Aunties who lived "along Gran's street and along the next and over the
field" had to be left out. As soon as postcard writing palled a sailor
came along providentially, took him to see the hen coops, and let him
find two eggs that had been laid.

Marcella wrote long letters home; only to Wullie did she mention Louis,
and even to him she said very little.

Noon came, and the boat deck was very hot. The chiming of bells in the
churches told when the moment of the Elevation came and passed; the
little reports sounded from the old mountain: she thought they sounded
like guns that had been fired a thousand years ago. Jimmy said he didn't
feel well, and went to sleep after a while; an Italian boy with black,
hyacinthine curls and swimming black eyes spied her white frock from his
little boat out in the bay: tying up to the accommodation ladder, he
stood singing a passionate song to the twanging of a guitar. She
wondered whether this were a personal tribute or a way of earning money.
The cap he held out for a coin showed it was the one; his eloquent eyes
and picturesque gestures as he begged her little withering bunch of vine
leaves showed it was the other. She tossed them to him carelessly, and
he bowed and kissed them gracefully.

At last the family parties began to come on board, with hot, tired
mothers, cross children and disillusioned fathers; then came the
emigrant girls, their hats covered in bright flowers. They were hustled
below by the third officer, who was superintending the sluicing of the
dusty, black decks. As Marcella went slowly below with Jimmy she heard
him declaring that coaling was the bane of his existence, as he pointed
out to the ship's doctor marks of black hands deliberately printed high
up on the shining white paint.

When she had finished her letters Marcella sat for a while perfectly
still while Jimmy slept and the fowls in the coops crooned. Down below
in the bunkers the coal went thudding faintly, heard up on the boat deck
more as vibrations than sounds, mingling with the tinkling of guitars,
the lazy splash of oars; somew