her mind for an instant."

"Don't you want to send back a line to ours by the pilot?" March asked.

She started from him. "Oh, was I really beginning to forget them?"

In the saloon where people were scattered about writing pilot's letters
she made him join her in an impassioned epistle of farewell, which
once more left none of the nothings unsaid that they had many times
reiterated. She would not let him put the stamp on, for fear it would
not stick, and she had an agonizing moment of doubt whether it ought not
to be a German stamp; she was not pacified till the steward in charge of
the mail decided.

"I shouldn't have forgiven myself," March said, "if we hadn't let Tom
know that twenty minutes after he left us we were still alive and well."

"It's to Bella, too," she reasoned.

He found her making their state-room look homelike with their familiar
things when he came with their daughter's steamer letter and the flowers
and fruit she had sent. She said, Very well, they would all keep, and
went on with her unpacking. He asked her if she did not think these home
things made it rather ghastly, and she said if he kept on in that way
she should certainly go back on the pilot-boat. He perceived that her
nerves were spent. He had resisted the impulse to an ill-timed joke
about the life-preservers under their berths when the sound of the
breakfast-horn, wavering first in the distance, found its way nearer and
clearer down their corridor.

VII.

In one of the many visits to the steamship office which his wife's
anxieties obliged him to make, March had discussed the question of seats
in the dining-saloon. At first he had his ambition for the captain's
table, but they convinced him more easily than he afterwards convinced
Mrs. March that the captain's table had become a superstition of the
past, and conferred no special honor. It proved in the event that the
captain of the Norumbia had the good feeling to dine in a lower saloon
among the passengers who paid least for their rooms. But while the
Marches were still in their ignorance of this, they decided to get what
adventure they could out of letting the head steward put them where he
liked, and they came in to breakfast with a careless curiosity to see
what he had done for them.

There seemed scarcely a vacant place in the huge saloon; through the
oval openings in the centre they looked down into the lower saloon
and up into the music-room, as thickly thronged wi