the bay that night, who flung down his cap and danced on it,
in an ecstasy of passionate argumentation. She had a memory of Durkin
almost as excited as the dancing harbor orator himself, raging up and
down the quay with a handful of Italian paper money between his
fingers, until the boatman relented. Then came a memory of tossing up
and down in a black and windy sea, of creeping under a great shadow
stippled with yellow lights, of grating and pounding against a ship's
ladder, of an officer in rubber boots running down to her assistance,
of more blinking lights, and then of the quiet and grateful privacy of
her own cabin, smelling of white-lead paint and disinfectants.

She slept that night, long and heavily, and it was not until the next
morning when the sun was high and they were well down the coast, that
she learned they were on board the British coasting steamer _Laminian_,
of the Gallaway & Papyani Line. They were to skirt the entire coast of
Italy, stopping at Naples and then at Bari, and then make their way up
the Adriatic to Trieste. These stops, Durkin had found, would be
brief, and the danger would be small, for the _Laminian_ was primarily
known as a freighter, carrying out blue-stone and salt fish, and on her
return cruise picking up miscellaneous cargoes of fruit. So her
passenger list, which included, outside of Frank and Durkin, only a
consumptive Welsh school-teacher and a broken-down clergyman from
Birmingham, who kept always to his cabin, was in danger of no
over-close scrutiny, either from the Neapolitan Guardie Municipali on
the one hand, or from any private agents of Keenan and Penfield on the
other.

Even one short day of unbroken idleness, indeed, seemed to make life
over for both Frank and Durkin. Steeping themselves in that
comfortable sense of security, they drew natural and easy breath once
more. They knew it was but a momentary truce, an interregnum of
indolence; but it was all they asked for. They could no longer nurse
any illusions as to the trend of their way or the endlessness of their
quest. They must now always keep moving. They might alter the manner
of their progression, they might change their stroke, but the
continuity of effort on their part could no more be broken than could
that of a swimmer at sea. They must keep on, or go down.

So, in the meantime, they plucked the day, with a touch of wistfulness
born of their very distrust of the morrow.

The glimmering sapphi