why didn't you ... oh, my dear, if you'd been on it, and I'd lost you!"

He put his arms about her and drew her on to his shoulder. "I'm all
right, mother!" he said.

Henry left the room hurriedly. He went to the kitchen and called to Mrs.
Clutters. "I won't be in to lunch," he said. "Don't let any one disturb
Mrs. Graham and Mr. Graham for a while. They ... they've had bad news!"

Then he went out of the house. The taxi-cab in which Mrs. Graham had
come was still standing outside the door.

"I ain't 'ad me fare yet," said the driver.

"All right!" said Henry. "I'll pay it."

He gave Cecily's address to the man, and then he got into the cab.

3

He could hear the newspaper boys crying out the news of the disaster as
he was driven swiftly to Cecily's house. The sinking of the great ship
had stunned men's minds and humiliated their pride. This beautiful
vessel, skilfully built, the greatest ship afloat, had seemed
imperishable, the most powerful weapon that man had yet forged to subdue
the sea, and in a little while, recoiling from the hidden iceberg, she
had foundered, broken as easily as a child's toy, carrying all her
vanity and strength to the bottom....

"It isn't true," he kept on saying to himself as if he were trying to
contradict the cries of the newsvendors. "She's a Belfast boat and
Belfast boats don't go down...."

He felt it oddly, this loss. The drowning of many men and women and
children affected him merely as a vague, impersonal thing. "Yes, it's
dreadful," he would say when he thought of it, but he was not moved by
it. When he remembered Tom Arthurs he was stirred, but less than Ninian
had been. He could see him now, just as he had stood in the shipyard
that day when John Marsh and Henry had been with him, and he had watched
the workmen pouring through the gates. "Those are my pals!" he had
said.... Poor Tom Arthurs! Destroyed with the thing that he had
conceived and his "pals" had built! But perhaps that was as he would
have wished. It would have hurt Tom Arthurs to have lived on after the
_Gigantic_ had gone down.... It was not the drowning of a crowd of
people or the drowning of Tom Arthurs that most affected Henry. It was
the fact that a boat built by Belfast men had foundered on her maiden
trip, on a clear, cold night of stars, reeling from the iceberg's blow
like a flimsy yacht. He had the Ulsterman's pride in the Ulsterman's
power, and he liked to boast that the best ships in the wor