tinct to be alone with her misery.

CHAPTER X

It was not until the _Oriana_ left Port Said that Louis spoke to
Marcella again. Three times he wrote to her demanding his money. Three
times something got beyond and above the pride that told her to send it
to him and have nothing else to say to him, and she refused definitely
to give him the money; she asked him to come and talk to her. But he
entrenched himself behind the Ole Fred gang and speedily helped to make
it the nuisance of the ship. The germ of self-confidence and courage
that was entirely missing in his make-up was replaced by bombast under
the combined influence of whisky and boredom. Some day, perhaps, the
iniquity of fastening up a small world of people in a ship for six weeks
with nothing compulsory to do will dawn upon shipping companies, and the
passengers will be forced to work, for their own salvation. On board
ship people drift; they drift into flirtation which rapidly becomes
either love-making or a sex-problem; they drift into drinking or, if
they have no such native weakness, they become back-biting and bad
tempered.

Marcella found herself drifting like the rest. A letter to Dr. Angus she
had begun to write the day after Naples asking him to explain the cause,
treatment and cure of drunkenness, still awaited completion. She sat
beside Louis's empty chair, physically too inert from want of strenuous
exercise, and mentally too troubled to get a grip on anything. Naples
had shown her that Louis had not come into her life merely as a
shipboard acquaintance to be forgotten and dropped when they reached
Sydney, as she would forget and drop Mrs. Hetherington, the schoolmaster
and Biddy. His talk of the coincidence of his coming by the _Oriana_ at
all had made a deep dint on her Keltic imagination; his appeal to her
for help had squared beautifully with her youthful dreams of
Deliverance; the fact that he was the first young man who had ever
talked to her probably had more than anything else to do with her
preoccupation, though she did not realize it.

At Port Said she and Jimmy spent a stifling morning ashore amid the dust
and smells of the native quarter. Turning a corner in the bazaar
suddenly they heard Louis's voice joined with the red-haired man's in a
futile song they sang night and day: it was a song about a man who went
to mow a meadow; the second verse was about two men; the third about
three and so on, as long as the singer's voice l