th breakfasters.
The tables were brightened with the bouquets and the floral designs of
ships, anchors, harps, and doves sent to the lady passengers, and at one
time the Marches thought they were going to be put before a steam-yacht
realized to the last detail in blue and white violets. The ports of the
saloon were open, and showed the level sea; the ship rode with no motion
except the tremor from her screws. The sound of talking and laughing
rose with the clatter of knives and forks and the clash of crockery; the
homely smell of the coffee and steak and fish mixed with the spice of
the roses and carnations; the stewards ran hither and thither, and a
young foolish joy of travel welled up in the elderly hearts of the pair.
When the head steward turned out the swivel-chairs where they were to
sit they both made an inclination toward the people already at table, as
if it had been a company at some far-forgotten table d'hote in the later
sixties. The head steward seemed to understand as well as speak English,
but the table-stewards had only an effect of English, which they
eked out with "Bleace!" for all occasions of inquiry, apology, or
reassurance, as the equivalent of their native "Bitte!" Otherwise there
was no reason to suppose that they did not speak German, which was the
language of a good half of the passengers. The stewards looked English,
however, in conformity to what seems the ideal of every kind of
foreign seafaring people, and that went a good way toward making them
intelligible.

March, to whom his wife mainly left their obeisance, made it so
tentative that if it should meet no response he could feel that it had
been nothing more than a forward stoop, such as was natural in sitting
down. He need not really have taken this precaution; those whose eyes he
caught more or less nodded in return.

A nice-looking boy of thirteen or fourteen, who had the place on the
left of the lady in the sofa seat under the port, bowed with almost
magisterial gravity, and made the lady on the sofa smile, as if she were
his mother and understood him. March decided that she had been some time
a widow; and he easily divined that the young couple on her right had
been so little time husband and wife that they would rather not have
it known. Next them was a young lady whom he did not at first think so
good-looking as she proved later to be, though she had at once a pretty
nose, with a slight upward slant at the point, long eyes under