th her conceptions of
travel in far lands than did the very respectable, commonplace fathers
of families she saw scattered about the deck. He was a man in knee
breeches, leather leggings, a bright blue shirt and a claret and buff
blazer. He wore a wide-brimmed brown hat and a fierce expression. From
his leather belt hung a huge clasp knife and two small pistols. She
thought him very funny, but very much like herself when she had dressed
up as King Arthur. She sympathized entirely with his dressing a part.
Later she heard shouts of cruel laughter as he explained valiantly that
he had never in his life been from his native village in the Welsh
hills--that Australia was a new country that needed to be "opened up." He
quoted Manville Fenn and other writers of boys' adventure stories thirty
or forty years old to show the dangers of Australia and his own
indomitable courage in tackling them: he told of Captain Cook's heart
and many other blood-curdling tales, and was greeted with ironical
cheers and laughter. They explained to him at great length all about the
civilization of Australia, and when, an hour after the Devon coast had
dropped below the horizon he became miserably sea-sick, they formed a
procession before him, carrying fire buckets, brandy and beer to his
assistance.

Marcella was muddled. She frowned and got no nearer a solution to her
puzzles, until she remembered that, right at the top of her trunk, put
in at the last moment, was a Golden Treasury her mother gave her years
ago.

She turned the pages to the end, looking for something she remembered
that seemed to fit in with her mood. In the Ode on the Intimations of
Immortality she read it--

"Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,"

she murmured. "Well, that means that I'm not the only one. Wordsworth
evidently got worried about things like I do. But it's the
cruelty--that's what I can't understand."

There was a little comfort in that thought as she fell asleep: it gave
her a sense of comradeliness that anyone so eminently sane as Wordsworth
should have had "blank misgivings."

CHAPTER VIII

Blue and silver had turned to blue and gold next morning; the light no
longer seemed to come from the sea in bright glitters; it was transfused
through the air as liquid gold, very mellow and soothing and softened.
It was five o'clock when she wakened. Through the open port she could
see the sea swelling gently, breaking into