too, when she was
sober, and had been cleaned up. The men who drank in her bar little knew
how she was transformed when she dressed herself to go up town. They
little knew, either, how very like the house upstairs was to houses in
Brixton or Hartlepool or the Paisley Road. Middle-class people are the
same all the world over. I expect they have fringes on their curtains
even in Honolulu! Rebecca had, anyhow.

"The news made a bit of stir among the ships for a while as might be
expected, and gradually spread right through the Merchant Service. 'Rosa
of Rebecca's was engaged to the Third of the _Corydon_!' By George, that
_was_ a morsel of gossip. Miss Bevan had heard about it in Barry; Polly
Loo in Singapore heard it, the girls in the Little Wooden Hut at Las
Palmas heard it. It went round the world, that Rosa of Rebecca's was
engaged.

"For three years we traded as regularly as a mail boat to Genoa with
coal, then across to Cartagena in Spain for iron ore and back to the
Tyne. I was Second, of course, and I passed for Chief when my time was
all in, just taking a few days off to go to Shields for the examination.
I might have got another ship, but I was pretty comfortable by now, I
knew my Chief and my engines, and I naturally wanted to keep on the
Genoa trade as long as I could. In those days they took weeks to
discharge, and so I used to have quite a spell with Rosa. She was never
bothered with 'men clawin' her,' as the Chief expressed it. I used to
take her up to the Giardino D'Italia to listen to the band and to see
the movies, or we'd take the Funicular up to Castellaccio and have a bit
of dinner at a little trattoria near the Righi, where you can look out
across the sea, I learned to speak the language pretty well, and it was
my intention at first to settle in Italy. But Rosa would not hear of it.
She wanted to get away from the associations of her childhood.

"Perhaps it was because of this desire of hers that we so often went up
and sat on the bastions of Castellaccio and looked out across the sea.
And it was here, one evening, that I spoke of a matter which had been in
my mind for some little time. We'd had Christmas together that year, and
it was a clear, cold, windless afternoon in January that we rode up out
of the city noise, and looked over the roofs and domes and hanging
gardens, and saw the orange trees heavy with snow, and the ripe fruit
glowing like globes of fire on the laden branches. You must not th