loud the enchantment of the night and of
the boat's speed, and as they strolled on again, having caught nothing,
Ramsey breathed softly to the old man:

"They can't describe it! Nobody can! I've tried!"

Through four or five breathings of the giant chimneys she waited for the
story she was not to hear, and at length herself broke silence. "I
think," she said, "this boat is the most wonderful thing in the world."

No one rejoined that it was or was not. "Don't you?" she airily
challenged the "labboardest of all," defensively letting herself realize
how nearly a woman she was, how merely a boy was he.

"It's very wonderful," replied Hugh indulgently, as one so nearly a man
should to one so merely a child. "I've never seen anything in this world
that wasn't."

"Neither have I!" cried the girl and clapped her hands.

In that moment, for the first time, each thought how admirable the
other, as yet so absurd, was--some day--probably--going--to be, and
right there arose between them a fellowship more potent than either
would recognize for a length of hours or days which is here best left
unstated. Their two seniors saw; saw, but kept still--_mais pourquoi
non?_--and why not?--while the great steamer breathed on, quivered on,
breathed and quivered, on and on.

Ramsey transiently forgot them. "Do you, too," she asked her
"labboardest," "feel yourself widen out of yourself and down and round
into all this wonderful boat till you are it and it's all--you?"

"Yes," Hugh confessed, and they in turn were still, even though the
seniors resumed converse, one mildly telling which sugar estates along
the shore had been whose and the other recounting how their heirs had
intermarried.

IX

SITTING SILENT

Thus they sat, Hugh and Ramsey, not recognizing that sitting silent is a
symptom.

They sat and together felt their consciousness, his and hers, wing and
wing, widen beyond their own frames to a mightier embodiment in this
great cloud-white structure breasting the air that cooled their brows
and cleaving unseen the flood so far beneath them. Together in this
greater self they felt the headway of the long, low hull, the prodigious
heart glow of the hungry fires, the cyclopean push of steam in eight
vast boilers, the pulsing click and travail of the engines--whisper of
valve and cylinder, noiseless in-plunge and out-glide of shining
rods--the ten-foot stroke of either shaft and equal sweep of crank, the
nimble beat o