re fussing to and fro like fiery water
beetles. From the man-of-war she saw the winking Morse light signalling
to the Heads. Trams clanged by in the distance; in a public-house near
by men were singing and laughing. In the room Louis was snoring gustily.
She turned from the open window and looked at him.

"There! I'm married to him now," she said, and looked from him round the
room. The walls were whitewashed: there was a good deal of blue in the
make-up of the whitewash, which gave the room a very cold impression.
There was a text "God Bless Our Home," adorned with a painted garland of
holly, over the door. Above the mantelpiece, which was bare save for the
two candles, was a Pears' Annual picture--Landseer's "Lion and Lioness,"
fastened to the wall with tacks driven through little round buttons of
scarlet flannel. There was a table covered with white oil-cloth on which
stood a basin and jug and an old pink saucer. Two chairs leaned against
the wall; one of them proved to have only three legs. A small mirror
with mildew marks hung on the wall. Under one of the windows was a small
table covered with a threadbare huckaback towel. The floor was bare
except for a slice of brown carpet by the bed; Marcella liked the bare
clean boards. They looked like the deck of a ship. She liked the room.
Its clean bareness reminded her, a little, of rooms in the farm after
the furniture had been sold.

Her baggage lay in a forlorn heap with Louis's, all jumbled together
just as the Customs Officers had left it. Taking off her shoes she put
on her bedroom slippers and began to move about quietly, unpacking
things, hanging her frocks on a row of pegs in the alcove, for there was
no cupboard of any description--putting some books on the mantelpiece,
her toilet things on the table. She was doing things in a dream, but it
was a dream into which outside things penetrated, for when she had
arranged the table beneath the window as a dressing-table it occurred to
her that it would have to be used for meals and she packed her things
away on the shelf above the row of pegs. Quite unthinkingly she had
accepted this place as home; after the tiny cabin it did not seem very
small; she was too mentally anxious to feel actual disadvantages. It was
days before the cramping influence of four walls made her stifle and
gasp for breath.

She had a vague idea that Louis ought not to be wakened, but, looking at
him, she saw that his neck was twisted uncomfort